Knowing God
Thursday, April 17th, 2008Just some brief thoughts I’ve been thinking about lately and talking about a little with family. I have realized more and more that for most of my Christian life (I have been a professing Christian since 1973) I did not really know the Lord. I don’t mean that I wasn’t saved…converted, regenerate, born again. That is God’s work and His doing. But what I am saying is that I didn’t know Him very well. The reason? I didn’t spend the time and effort to get to know Him. I didn’t hang out where He is. I didn’t know where He was.
I started pretty well, but somewhere down the line I decided that knowing God was something you could accomplish by speculating, guessing, assuming and presuming! I didn’t realize that for as long as we live on this earth, we are tied to the Bible as the only source for what we can know about Him. That is where He is…where He is described, where He speaks, where He instructs and teaches us about Himself. To try to know Him any other way–by mystical experiences or our own intuitions–is to end up not knowing Him, but rather having an acquaintance with a god we have manufactured ourselves, for ourselves. In large part, that is what I ended up with. That god, I found, was of absolutely no use or help to me in the day of trouble. I had to go back to the Bible, to anchor myself back to the source of truth about God, in order to have a knowledge of Him and therefore a relationship with Him, that was solid and real. Then I found Him to be all that the Bible proclaims Him to be.
Knowing God is not just something that automatically happens when we are saved. We know from our human relationships that close ones take effort, and thought, and intentionality, and time. That is just the same as it is with God. If we think we know Him yet do not hang out often and with regularity in His word; if we don’t think about His word during the day, enjoying that communion with Him through the Holy Spirit that is called “fellowship;” if our minds aren’t informed by what His word reveals about Him as we pray and talk and converse and teach; then we can’t really know Him. We’re misinformed and inaccurate as to who He is…and we don’t do ourselves or anyone else any good!
There’s nothing mystical or hard to understand about getting to know God. He said, “And you will seek Me, and you will find Me when you search for Me with all of your hearts.” We just have to want to get to know Him, and be willing to go where He is, to listen to Him speak, to read about His great deeds and His workings and what He does and how He does it. We will come to know Him, little by little, better and better. There is no other place, no other source for getting to know Him, than through His word, the Bible. The Holy Spirit takes the words of Scripture and applies them to our minds and hearts in a living way. And we come to know Him.
But we must come to those living words. We must be determined to meet Him there, to commune with Him there and to find Him there. Knowing God does not happen apart from our seeking Him.
“Let us know; let us press on to know the LORD;
his going out is sure as the dawn;
he will come to us as the showers,
as the spring rains that water the earth.” Hosea 6:3