Pursue Intimacy With Jesus

“Did I actually surrender my life to Jesus?”

I was at a Starbucks with this thirty-something guy, and as he shared his story with me, he was crying. Not just teary-eyed; I mean snot and tears. He was ugly crying. It was the kind of situation where you might be embarrassed to be sitting across from that. (Not me, of course, but some people would.) And this young man was wrestling through whether his conversion at age eight was real. Was it his own or was it for his mom? Because in his teen and young adult years, he’d had some pretty epic failures—the kind where a lot of churches are not going to welcome you in.

As I listened, I began to understand what we are up against in the Bible Belt. Too many churches are more concerned about your behavior than whether you have a life-giving relationship with Jesus. Maybe this has been your experience too.

And it wasn’t just this one young man. Countless twenty- and thirty-somethings tell me, with a straight face, that they grew up in church, participated in vacation Bible school, went to youth camp—and they never heard the gospel. They knew what they should and shouldn’t do, they knew the morality of the kingdom, but they knew nothing of intimacy with Jesus.

And this man who was sipping a grand caffè mocha between his sobs was asking, “Did I actually surrender my life to Jesus when I was eight? Or was I just trying to please my mom?”

I do believe that an eight-year-old can surrender to Jesus and fall in love with Him, because that’s my wife’s story. Her faith has grown, but she’d be the first to tell you of her eight-year-old self, “I knew Him. I loved Him. I was crazy about Him.” Her faith was, and is, real.

But what I am seeing and hearing is that many in the church have a misunderstanding—like these young people I was encountering—of what it means to know and love God.

I’ll bet you know folks like this. And it’s also possible that you are someone like this. If that’s you, I want you to own it. Or have you fallen asleep? Have you fallen under a spell? Have you, in some way, been lulled to sleep? Because you are a son or daughter who was created for relationship with the King.

If this is your story, if you’ve been sleeping, then the Holy Spirit might be waking you up today. Your story might be like the story of this young man. Maybe your faith was sincere, but because you weren’t attached to the vine and bore no fruit, you’re wondering if it was real. You want authentic life in Him, but you took a wrong turn.

It may also be possible that your story is just the opposite of this guy’s story. Maybe you’ve been working really hard religiously but have never surrendered and had a relationship with Jesus. Different tune, same song. Even if you’ve been showing up at church, your heart might be just as far from Jesus, in this moment, as the man who was undone in the café that day. I hope you can sense my tone in these words: I’m not condemning you. I’m just checking in to see if you’re sleepy. Because if you are, I want to invite you into the joy and vitality of awake life in Jesus.

If your heart is far from Jesus today, in any variety of circumstances, you are that lost coin described in Luke 15 that Jesus has been hunting for. I mean, He’s turned on His cell phone flashlight; He’s breathing in the dust from under the beds because He’s looking for you. And what He has for you now is so much better than whatever was happening where you were hiding from Him. It’s intimacy. He’s welcoming you into a loving relationship with Him.

It doesn’t matter if you first met Christ when you were eight, eighteen, or eighty-eight. What matters is whether you’re experiencing that intimacy for which you were made. That’s the love relationship my wife has known with Christ. Or are you heartbroken, like the man across the table from me at Starbucks? Have you missed out on some good years of intimacy with Christ because of either irreligiosity or religiosity? More importantly, will that grief you feel move you into the relationship with Him for which you were made?

Today, you can say yes to it—yes to intimacy with Christ.

Tune in to hear Matt Chandler, lead pastor at The Village Church in Flower Mound, Texas, this Monday and Tuesday, April 20 and 21, on LIFE TODAY. Taken from Awake and Alive: A 30-Day Challenge to Revive Your Faith by Matt Chandler. Copyright © 2025 by Matt Chandler. Used by permission of Thomas Nelson, a registered trademark of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Inc.