Video Transcript: Knowing God

Knowing God
By David Feddes

Thus says the Lord: “Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast about this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight,” declares the Lord. (Jeremiah 9:23-24)

Knowing God – that's what it's all about. A failure to know God is the cause of nearly every other form of failure in our lives. Knowing God is the key to everything worth glorying in, worth bragging about.

Evidence or hearsay

One of my favorite books is The Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer. Dr. Tozer wrote, "To most people God is an inference, not a reality. He is a deduction from evidence which they consider adequate, but he remains personally unknown to the individual. Others know of him only by hearsay. They have heard about Him from others, and have put belief in Him into the back of their minds along with various odds and ends that make up their total creed."

Some people believe in God on the basis of good evidence for the fact that God is there. Others know of him only by hearsay: somebody else told them that there's a God, and they believed it. They heard that God exists the same way they heard a lot of other stuff. They filed it away in the back of their mind and said, "Yeah, God's probably there."

Some people wonder why many young people are falling away from the church, and they say the problem is that too many people hear about God when they are children, and they kind of believe it for a while, but nobody ever gave them the evidence, the apologetic reasons to believe in God. If only they had a clearer statement of all the proofs and evidences that God is real, they would not be nearly so likely to stop believing.

There may be some truth in that, but Dr. Tozer has a different diagnosis. He says that whether you believe in God just because of hearsay and don't have other reasons for believing, or whether you consider the evidence to be quite adequate, there's a severe lack either way. The great lack is this: people don't know God personally. 

Personal experience

Dr. Tozer goes on to write, "Over against all this cloudy vagueness stands the clear scriptural doctrine that God can be known in personal experience. People can know God with at least the same degree of immediacy as they know any other person or thing." 

Then he mentions some biblical statements: “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8). Just as you can taste your dinner, you can taste God. Just as you can see things around you, you can see God. 

“My sheep hear my voice” (John 10:27). Just as you can hear things around you, you can hear the voice of Jesus.

Jeremiah could say, “The Lord touched my mouth” (Jeremiah 1:9). Just as you can feel that you're being touched by another person, you can sense God's touch. 

Now, sight and taste and touch of God are spiritual, not physical. Experience of God is not bodily experience, but it's no less real than bodily experience. The point is that through personal experience, you can spiritually taste, see, hear, and touch God. As Tozer puts it,

In the words of Jesus, “You must be born again." If there is rebirth, then your "heart organs," your spiritual faculties that God created you to have but that have long been deadened,  come alive again. You begin to perceive God. He becomes a reality to you: not just an inference or something you heard about, but a living reality in your experience.

Inward numbness

But why do even Christians often lack such experience? All of us lack experience to at least some degree. Our experience of God is only partial until the day we see God face to face. Even so, we could experience a lot more of God in this life than we do. Why don't we? Tozer asks, 


Where our faith is weak and wavering, it numbs our faculty to perceive the reality of God right here with us and all around us. Tozer goes on:


If you listen to philosophers, they may question whether you can prove God's reality, but the philosophers will also question whether you can prove the existence of physical reality or the existence of other minds, and they will conclude that you can't prove those things. They will also insist that you can't prove the reliability of memory. How do you know that something you remember really happened? You have this impression and this recall, but nothing can prove your memory to be true. And yet we reckon on the general reliability of our memory unless something has really gone wrong with our mind. We reckon that people around us are real, even though we can't really prove that anything exists outside the workings of our own mind and sensations. We just reckon on those things and behave as though they're so.

We have a God-given faculty for perceiving, but sin has fogged it up or dirtied it and made it very hard to perceive God as a reality. We still may believe he's there based on the evidence or what we're told, but God doesn't seem real in our day-to-day activity. However, we don't have to remain stuck there.

God-consciousness

Listen again to A. W. Tozer:


If those words don't awaken longing, then our difficulties are dreadful. If those words awaken a sense of, “I've tasted that a little bit, and I long for more,” that's a good sign. This God-consciousness, this constant awareness of living in the reality and the presence of God, is what we are meant to have.

Not knowing God

When we read the book of Jeremiah, we read about a lot of terrible problems. But it's really not complicated what lies at the root of those problems: not knowing God. “The priests did not ask, ‘Where is the LORD?’ Those who deal with the law did not know me; the leaders rebelled against me. The prophets prophesied by Baal, following worthless idols” (Jeremiah 2:8). Idols seemed more real to them than God, so that's what they followed. Even those who were supposed to be dealing with God's law didn't know God. “My people are fools; they do not know me. They are senseless children; they have no understanding. They are skilled in doing evil; they know not how to do good” (Jeremiah 4:22).

All the other stuff you read about in Jeremiah, all the terrible practices and things that infuriate God and bring judgment down on the people of Judah--all those things come down to this: “They don't know me.” 

In one case, Jeremiah speaks against King Jehoiakim. King Jehoiakim has just finished a grand building project, a fabulous winter palace. He forces slaves to work on the palace and doesn't pay them anything for doing it. When he's done, he's got his palace, and his people remain in poverty. Then Jeremiah sends the king a written message: 

Jehoiakim's father was godly King Josiah. He knew God and what God is like. He lived under God's kingship, and that shaped his own kingship. He looked out for the poor and needy and protected them from the rich and the powerful. But Jehoikim didn't know God and didn't rule the way his godly father had ruled. For kings as well as for ordinary people, the key is whether they know God.

How does King Jehoiakim respond to Jeremiah's message? He asks for Jeremiah's scroll. Then he proceeds to cut it slice by slice and burns the whole thing. 

But the truth of God's Word doesn't burn like the paper it's written on. After the king burns the scroll, Jeremiah says, "I wrote another scroll and added many similar things to it" (Jeremiah 36:32). Jeremiah had a message for the wicked king: "You are going to have the burial of a donkey, dumped outside the city" (Jeremiah 22:19). Within a year, the king was dead. He didn't receive the noble burial of a king. People had no good memories of him. They were just glad to put him in the ground so that he didn't stink things up anymore. That's what became of the king who didn't know God and burned the message from God. That's a warning of what happens to anyone who refuses to know God and listen to God's Word.

Do you know God?

Here are some questions to ask ourselves to discern whether we really know God and to what degree. This not a theology quiz. Good theology is very important, but these are personal questions about whether God is real in your own experience. 

• What makes you come alive?
• What guides you?
• What makes you feel secure?
• What scares you?
• What are you ashamed of?
• What makes you laugh?
  
• What do you glory in?

What makes you come alive? 

God says through Jeremiah, "But my people have changed their glory for that which does not profit… my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water" (Jeremiah 2:11,13). So you have two choices: do you want to drink fresh, cold spring water, or do you want to drink dirt? God says, "My people have turned into a bunch of dirt drinkers." You have this possibility of cascading springs of fresh water from God that you can drink from, or you can go to one of the broken cisterns. You can go to this hole in the ground, and it's a broken one. It's not even lined well so that it holds water. The water leaks out of it, and what you get is dirt and mud and sludge at the bottom. So you drop your bucket in there and try to scoop up whatever you can get, hoping something satisfying comes out of the sludge.

God says all sins boil down to just two main sins. One is turning your back on God the fountain of living water, and the other is all those attempts you make to find happiness on your own, to find satisfaction on your own. That can take all kinds of forms. It may take the form of pursuing drink or drugs to get that buzz one more time and maybe get a little more of it this time than the last time. It can involve the pursuit of pleasure through sexual pursuits. It might involve the pursuit of certain respectable pleasures like getting rich and having a fine house. Remember, "Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom." It might be your big education. "Let not the strong man boast of his strength." It might be your clout and your power or just your physical ability or your athletic ability. It might be any of the kinds of things we tend to brag about. But those are empty cisterns that hold a lot of mud at the bottom, and they are not designed to satisfy our hunger because only the water of God can do that.

So that's one question to discover whether you know God: what makes you come alive, gets you excited, makes you happy?

What guides you?

When it comes to decision time, what guides you? What controls your thinking? Are you constantly looking to the Word of God to control your thinking? Are you meditating on God's Word, trying to memorize it and finding out how it applies to your particular situation? Are you seeking God's personal and direct guidance as you make decisions? Are you attuned to him in prayer? 

Or do you make a decision as though God isn't there? Are you a practical atheist in your decision-making? If you're honest, you might have to say, "Yeah, God is there in the back of my mind along with other thoughts that I kind of hold in storage, but he's not an operative reality in the way that I think and make my decisions." 

Jeremiah says, 

Oh, how I wish this were only 2,600-year-old news that was true in Jeremiah's time but not in ours. But "the lying pen of the scribes" is more adept at lying than it has ever been. There are many of my fellow PhDs, people who are scholars and professors, who have become experts in "the lying pen of the scribes." They know nearly everything except what God says. Everything in the Bible is doubtful. In their minds, everything from the latest findings of their own research and their fellow scholars' opinions is dead certain--but it's more dead than certain!

Birds know when to migrate. They follow God's guidance system. Jeremiah is saying, "Be a bird brain." Calling these people bird brains would actually be a compliment to them because the birds know when to fly and where to fly because God directs them in that. But people won't follow God's guidance system for them. They don't know what path to take because they're not listening to God. Unlike birds, people are not meant to be governed simply by the instincts that God puts in them but by a conscious awareness of God and of his presence and of his Word.

What makes you feel secure?

Another question to test  whether you really know God is, what makes you feel secure? Or, on the flip side of that, what makes you worry?

One thing that helps some people to feel secure is their religious identity, their religious practices, even the very place where they worship. In the time of Jeremiah, they had this fabulous temple that Solomon had built hundreds of years earlier. It was the place where God had promised to dwell in a special way and be available to his people. And yet, they misunderstood what this temple was. Jeremiah, speaking for God, says, They thought of the temple like a good luck charm. God could not possibly punish them or destroy the city of Jerusalem so long as his temple was located there. Poor God! He needs a temple! What would poor God do without his temple? He would never punish or destroy the place where his temple stood! But not long after that, the temple was utterly demolished.

Long before Jeremiah, long before the temple was even built, Israel had the ark of the covenant in a tabernacle. The rotten sons of Eli, who were priests, thought they could use the ark as a good luck charm to control God. They could just grab God and move God into battle by taking the ark into battle. They figured, "Nobody can defeat an army that carries the ark, right?" Wrong! The ark was captured and those wicked priests were killed in the battle.

In Jeremiah's time, the leaders and the people thought their city could never fall because God's temple was there. But it fell. 

In the time of Jesus, the same thing happens again. People who didn't really know God thought that the rebuilt temple would keep them safe. Jesus walks into that temple area, where they're buying and selling. Jesus says, "This place is a den of robbers. I'll tell you the truth, there's not going to be one stone left on another." Again and again, people sought security in their place of worship rather than in a real relationship with God. They misunderstood what temples are for.

Psalm 27 shows us what a temple is really for: "One thing I ask of the Lord, this is what I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple. My heart says of you, 'Seek his face!' Your face, Lord, I will seek." A place of worship is a place to seek God's face and to love him and to know him.

If you start treating that place of worship as your good luck charm, or any of your other religious practices as something that's going to make you safe and secure, without knowing or longing for the face of the living God, it's simply not going to work. When God withdrew his glory from the temple, it became just another building. And when people started relying on the place instead of the God who indwelled it, they were in deep, deep trouble.

Jesus said the time had come when people would not worship in this place or that place, but would will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for that's the kind of worshipers that God desires. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in Spirit and in truth (John 4:21-24). This is vital: to truly know God and to worship God in Spirit and in truth.

The flip side of what makes you feel secure is what scares you. You're scared that you're not that strong or that you're not that healthy or you don't have that much influence and you don't have much control. Some of us feel secure because we have a sense of control over our circumstances. Some of us feel secure if we've got lots of money and really, really insecure if we don't.

Others are insecure because of various superstitions. Jeremiah talks about some of the superstitions that people have, whether it's false gods, horoscopes, crystal balls, or all the other stuff that's supposed to affect your future. 

So steer clear of idols, of gods constructed by humans. The convenient thing about such gods is that they are controllable, they are manageable, they are not personal. The disadvantage is they can't say or do anything. They can't help or harm you. Only God has supreme power to help or harm.

God is saying that all those things that scare you are not worth being scared of. Don't be like stupid crows who are scared of scarecrows. Even crows are often smarter than that. After a while, they notice the scarecrow doesn't do much, and then they fly in and do their thing anyway. 

When we go through life with this fear, that fear, and the other fear, it is evidence that we do not know God well enough, that he is not real enough to us. If God is the overwhelming reality to us, if he is present to us and we are fully aware of him, nothing will scare us except him.

The Bible says that believers are more than conquerors through Jesus Christ and that nothing can separate us from his love. But the only way to really be sure that we're more than conquerors is to know God and to have a strong awareness that he's here with us right now. Otherwise, the scarecrows are going to scare us. If your number one challenge in life is worry, then the number one thing that's needed is to know God, to really know his nearness and his presence--not just to believe that he's there but to know that he's here. Jesus said, "Don't fear what other people fear. Don't even fear those who can kill you. Fear the one who can destroy both body and soul in hell." If you know God, you know there is only one thing to be afraid of: his wrath and rejection in hell. If you have God's acceptance, you have zero to be afraid of. "Perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment" (1 John 4:18). God is the only fear in the universe worthy of being feared. If you're no longer afraid of him, then you need not be afraid of anything else.

What are you ashamed of?

Another test of how well you know God is this: what are you ashamed of? So often we get embarrassed about what other people think of us or even by what they might think of us. "How do I look? Is my makeup on properly? Do I have a hole in my pants?" It might be embarrassing to have holes--or, if holes are in style, it might be embarrassing not to have holes in the right place. We're ashamed of a variety of things, but we need to have a proper sense of shame. Once again, your sense of shame varies with how well you know God and how real he is to you in a given situation. 

Jeremiah says twice, "Are they ashamed of their loathsome conduct? No, they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush. So they will fall among the fallen" (Jeremiah 6:15, 8:12) There is a certain kind of shamelessness where people are no longer embarrassed about shameful things. People who are starting to know God will say this instead: "Let us lie down in our shame, and let our dishonor cover us. For we have sinned against the LORD our God, we and our fathers, from our youth even to this day, and we have not obeyed the voice of the LORD our God" (Jeremiah 3:24-25).

Nowadays, we have parades in many major cities. Even candy companies like Skittles urge us to "taste the rainbow." But they're not just talking about candy. The parades celebrate "tasting the rainbow" of every deviant practice known to man. If you live in a society like that, after a while that sort of stuff is no longer embarrassing. What you're embarrassed about is letting your voice be heard to the contrary. The Bible says, "Though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them" (Romans 1:32). So it all depends on what you're embarrassed about. Paul says, "I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes" (Romans 1:16) 

Some people, if they struggle with perversions or perverse tendencies, may feel that God has forsaken them. That's not so either. If you realize that something is amiss and that it's wrong, then you can ask for God's help. It's not something you celebrate and delight in and approve of and seek others who approve of.

This is one of the most telling things about whether we really know God or not. What are the kinds of things that I get embarrassed about? Am I ashamed of things that are sinful and wrong? Or do I get embarrassed about talking to other people about God and the gospel? Do my cheeks start to flush and I get nervous and embarrassed about that?

What makes you laugh?

Another good test of how well you know God is what makes you laugh. When you're watching TV, what makes you feel cheerful? What do you find funny and amusing and kind of enjoyable? Again, that's a very telling test, more telling than how you're going to do on your next theology quiz. What do you like? What makes you laugh or feel happy?

What do you glory in?

What are you thrilled about? What are you happy and excited about? Are you excited about knowing more than other people? For some, it's fun to know more than other people do, to know that you can out-argue them. You can win the debate competition, you can win personal arguments, you can show people you're smarter than they are. Feeling smarter than others--that's a geek pleasure. If you're not a geek, you might glory in jock pleasures, in being a mighty man: "I'm bigger than you are, little geek. You may be able to out-think and out-argue me, but I can thump you." That's how kids act when they're young, but when you're 50 or 60, the same games are still being played. Some are still trying to use their mental capacities to outmaneuver others, and some are trying to use their position and power to thump those smart alecks and get what they want.

Look at the status that comes with having an expensive car. A car that costs $100,000 is, in general, not going to do a lot better job of getting you from here to there than a cheap one. But somehow, you feel important if you just blew a pile of money on an expensive car. If you have a fantastic palace, a huge mansion that requires a cleaning crew to take care of, that might make you feel important. The rich man boasts of his riches. That's how you glory in your riches: conspicuous consumption.

In other societies, the rich people in the tribe make several mounds of yams from their fields, and then they just leave the yams to rot. They don't let anybody have them; they make piles of yams and let them rot just because they can. It's a display of their wealth. It's like Jehoiakim: "I'm going to build this palace even though my kingdom is falling apart, even though the people are impoverished. I'm building this palace because I can." The rich man is going to boast in his riches.

What are you glorying in: smarts or power or riches, or knowing God? "Thus says the LORD: 'Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the LORD.'” (Jeremiah 9:23-24)

What does it mean for a person to boast that he understands and knows God? It's not bragging, "I know God better than you do. I had three visions last week, and you didn't." Here, the King James Version is helpful. Instead of "boasting," it speaks of "glorying" in knowing the Lord. What a glory it is to know God! I want to share that glory, not to say how well I know God or what a great person I am for knowing him, but how great God is and what an amazing thing it is to know him! I want to share with you what little I know of him so that you can benefit from that. So it's not bragging about our own superiority; it is boasting about the Lord Jesus Christ and glorying in him.

Facing our lack

We've considered some questions to find out how well we know God.

• What makes you come alive?
• What guides you?
• What makes you feel secure?
• What scares you?
• What are you ashamed of?
• What makes you laugh?
  
• What do you glory in?

These are tests of how much God is a reality to us. Remember, we can know God just as well as we know other people around us, the way we know a spouse or a friend. Knowing key people in your life has an impact on who you are and how you live your life. The impact is even greater if you know God, if you know that God is there, that God is here, and that God is within you.

For most of us, one of the first things we need to do is to face our lack. This is not necessarily a lack of head knowledge but of heart knowledge. The lack might not show up on a theology quiz but in an empty prayer life. 

What is your prayer life like when nobody else is looking? What's going on in your heart? Do you know God, or do you just kind of keep yourself busy doing God-type stuff? Sometimes people chuck the God-type stuff after awhile because they're sick of it. One of the most telling tests is simply our own prayer life. Do we enjoy spending time with God, or does 3-4 minutes of praying seem like an endless amount of time? This is one of the most searching tests of knowing God: our own prayer life.

A heart to know God

Jeremiah says basically, "If you don't know God, there's not much you can do about it on your own. God has to make himself known, and God has to give you a heart to know him." Jeremiah talks about two different groups of people: those who got dragged away into captivity before the final fall of Jerusalem, and others who remained in the land of Judah and Jerusalem. The conclusion seemed pretty obvious: the bad ones were those who got dragged off into captivity, and the good people were the ones who remained in Jerusalem. But God said the opposite.

God gave Jeremiah a vision of two bowls of figs, one rotten, the other good. The bad figs were the people who had been able to stay in their own land. They rejected the idea that God was going to judge them, or they ran off to Egypt to try to escape judgment. But they were not going to escape destruction. The good figs were the people you would least expect: the exiles. God says, “Like these good figs, I regard as good the exiles from Judah, whom I sent away from this place to the land of the Babylonians. My eyes will watch over them for their good, and I will bring them back to this land. I will build them up and not tear them down; I will plant them and not uproot them. I will give them a heart to know me, that I am the LORD. They will be my people, and I will be their God, for they will return to me with all their heart.” (Jeremiah 24:5-7)

A heart to know God—that is the greatest gift that God can give. If it's not given, then you are in trouble. You can be staying behind in Jerusalem for a while. The temple may still be standing, the walls still look pretty good for the moment, but all is lost. On the other hand, if you've been carted off into exile and you're made a slave and things look very bad, but God has given you a heart to know him, then all is well. 

And so it is today. When everything is going your way except having a heart for God, all is lost. When everything's going against you except the fact that God has given you a heart for him, then all things are yours because you are Christ's and Christ is God's (1 Corinthians 3:21-23).

New covenant: sins forgiven, hearts that know God

The great promise of Jeremiah is the promise of the new covenant. This passage is quoted again and again in the New Testament. God says, “I will make a new covenant… I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,” declares the LORD. “For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” (Jer 31:31-34)

To know means to relate to. In order for God to relate to us, in order for God to know us, we need to be forgiven by God. God knows all the facts about us, of course, but at the last day, Jesus is going to say to some people, "I never knew you" (Matthew 7:23). This means, "I never related to you in that personal, interactive way." We need to be forgiven and cleansed so that the Lord can know us. First we need God to know us, to see us as his own, and then we need him to give us a heart to know him. We need him to give us this new heart, this new spirit, that is in tune with God's law. Then we want what God wants. Our mind and our heart long for the things that God longs for. God writes his law on our hearts and gives us a heart for him. The fulfillment of that new covenant is our Lord Jesus Christ.

Jesus makes God known

"No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known" (John 1:18). Our Lord Jesus Christ, when he prayed to his Father on the night before he was crucified, said, “Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent… I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.” (John 17:3,26) 

Jesus came in human form to make God known to humans. So if you really want to know God, the first thing is to focus on Jesus, who is God coming to us in human flesh: to listen to his voice, to see the events that happened in the Scriptures that are recorded for us so that we get familiar with Jesus and who he is; and then, as his Spirit works in us to give us that heart for him, to sense that Jesus is still living, still present, and walking with us through each day.

The apostle Paul said, "I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ… that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead" (Philippians 3:8-14). To know God in Christ--this is the burning desire of those who've been given a heart from God.

Nothing to brag about… except the Lord Jesus Christ!

Paul wrote the best commentary on Jeremiah 9:22-23, the verses we've been looking at. First, he considers what we shouldn't be bragging about. Then he tells us the only thing worth boasting about.

"Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things— and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him" (1 Corinthians 1:26-29). If God chose only the wise, only people with a high IQ or great test scores could know him. If God chose only the strong, only rich and influential people could know him. If God chose only those of noble birth, only the blue bloods could know him.

In Jeremiah's time, when God decided whom to give the new hearts and the future to, he didn't pick the people who seemed to be in the best position, who were still in the city and had everything. He chose the exiles, the captives, the castaways, the despised ones. And he continues to choose the lowly to know him, not those who take pride in being smarter or stronger or more impressive. God doesn't want anybody bragging, "I deserve this. I earned it. I qualified for it." God doesn't want anybody to boast about anything except God. As Paul puts it, "It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written: “Let him who boasts boast in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 1:30-31). Elsewhere Paul writes, "Far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ." If you know the Lord, you will glory in the Lord.

Knowing God better by meditation 

We've seen that before we can do anything, God must first take action and make himself known to us and give us a heart to know him. But once he has done that, it's still possible to have a new heart and yet have a very clouded and infrequent sense of God's reality and presence in your life. We need our heart knowledge to grow. J.I. Packer asks,

Sometimes our Bible reading is just a chore, and we think, "Okay, I read my chapter for the day. Done. Glad I got that taken care of. Now I don't have to feel guilty until tomorrow. Whew!" It's usually better to read the Bible than not to read it. But we need to do more than read quickly; we need to meditate slowly. Packer is saying, "You have to take these truths, and you need to spend some time to absorb them, and do so realizing you're doing it in God's presence. You're learning not just about God, but you're doing it in the presence of God." Then you start talking to God about it in prayer. Through meditation you learn to combine your Bible reading and your prayer into a conversation. You talk to God in response to what you learn in reading his Word. You listen to him as you ponder the Scripture, and you ask him to show  you more of himself.

If meditation on what God reveals in his Word is missing in your life, you can remain stuck with feeling like God is outside your range of experience, outside what you think about most of the time, instead of being God-conscious and having God on your mind a lot and seeing life in the light of God. Meditation can help you to know God more intimately. Lack of meditation can weaken your internal faculty of spiritual seeing. The physical organs of the body atrophy if they're not used. If you closed your eyes for a month and then tried to open them, they would not work very well. If you have your arm in a cast for three months, it is very wimpy when you take off the cast because it hasn't been used. So it is with our inner faculty, our inner heart for God. If it's not used in meditation and dwelling on God and conversation with him, it gets very weak. So we must pray to God for a heart for him and then dwell on the things of God with our hearts.

Knowing in relationship

"God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord" (1 Corinthians 1:9). When we're reading through the Bible, we can read over sentences like that--and yet those sentences are everything. God has called us into the fellowship of his Son! He has called us into communion with his Son. He's called us into connection with his Son, into relationship with him, into an interactive, conversational walk with Jesus. God called us into that. "Our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ" (1 John 1:3).  We don't just have a theoretical belief that God exists somewhere out there and created stuff, or even that Jesus lived long ago and did stuff that we believe really happened. Our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. A living, relational fellowship that is, not just was. That's here, not just there. 

The apostle Peter writes, "Grace and peace be yours in abundance through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires" (2 Peter 1:2-4). God gives interactive knowledge of his reality and experience of him. So what are we going to brag about? What are we going to glory in? Not our wisdom, our might, our wealth. What are we going to worry about? Not the lack of those things. What we glory in is this: that we understand and know God, that we know his loving-kindness, his justice or fairness, his righteousness, his goodness, that we know him and what he's like, and that more and more we are becoming like him and reflecting his image.

Prayer

Father, help each of us now to take to heart these words. If any lack a heart for you, please grant that new covenant blessing of a living heart. Lord, remove the heart of stone. Give out of your generosity and mercy, and for the sake of Jesus give the heart of flesh, the living heart that beats and longs for you, that has a faculty for knowing you. 

Lord, we pray for those of us who do have that new heart but who so often find ourselves wandering in fog and having our spiritual perception clouded over. Help us to seek your face more and more, and not just to know you theoretically or on the basis of evidence or what we're told. We do thank you for those who have told us great truths. We do thank you for the many evidences you have provided. But we pray that above all, we may know you in personal encounter, that our fellowship may be with the Father and with our Lord Jesus Christ. We pray in his name. Amen.