September 26, 2010
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knowing God
What follows is a quote from J.I.Packer's book "Knowing God", Chapter 2, followed by some Bible passages and a couple brief questions.
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I walked in the sunshine with a scholar who had effectively forfeited his prospects of academic advancement by clashing with church dignitaries over the gospel of grace. 'But it doesn't matter', he said at length, 'for I've known God and they haven't.' The remark was a mere parenthesis, a passing comment on something I had said, but it has stuck with me, and set me thinking.
Not many of us, I think, would ever naturally say that we have known God. The words imply a definiteness and matter-of-fact-ness of experience to which most of us, if we are honest, have to admit that we are still strangers. We claim, perhaps, to have a testimony, and can rattle off our conversion story with the best of them; we say that we know God--this, after all, is what evangelicals are expected to say; but would it occur to us to say, without hesitation, and with reference to particular events in our personal history, that we have known God? I doubt it, for I suspect that with most of us experience of God has never become so vivid as that.
Nor, I think, would many of us ever naturally say that in the light of the knowledge of God which we have come to enjoy that past disappointments and present heartbreaks, as the world counts heartbreaks, don't matter. For the plain fact is thatto most of us they do matter. We live with them as our 'crosses' (so we call them). Constantly we find ourselves slipping into bitterness and apathy and gloom as we reflect on them, which we frequently do. The attitude we show to the world is a sort of dried-up stoicism, miles removed from the 'joy unspeakable and full of glory' which Peter took for granted that his readers were displaying (1 Peter 1:8).
'Poor souls', our friends say of us, 'how they've suffered' -- and that is just what we feel about ourselves! But these private mock heroics have no place at all in the minds of those who really know God. They never brood on might-have-beens; they never think of the things they have missed, only of what they have gained. 'What things were gain to me, these have I counted loss for Christ,' wrote Paul. 'Yea verily, and I count all things to be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as dung, that I may gain Christ, and be found in Him...that I may know Him...' (Phil. 3:7-10) When Paul says he counts the things he lost 'dung', he means not merely that he does not think of them as having any value, but also that he does not live with them constantly in his mind: what normal person spends his time nostalgically dreaming of manure? Yet this, in effect, is what many of us do. It shows how little we have in the way of true knowledge of God.
We need frankly to face ourselves at this point. We are, perhaps, orthodox evangelicals. We can state the gospel clearly, and can smell unsound doctrine a mile away. If anyone asks us how men may know God, we can at once produce the right formulae -- that we come to know God through Jesus Christ the Lord, in virtue of His cross and mediation, on the basis of His word of promise, by the power of the Holy Spirit, via a personal exercise of faith. Yet the gaiety, goodness, and unfetteredness of spirit which are the marks of those who have known God are rare among us--rarer, perhaps, than they are in some other Christian circles, where, by comparison, evangelical truth is less clearly and fully known. Here, too, it would seem that the last may prove to be first, and the first last. A little knowledge of God is worth more than a great deal of knowledge about Him.
To focus this point further, let me say two things: First, one can know a great deal about God without much knowledge of Him. ... Second, one can know a great deal about godliness without much knowledge of God....
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John 7:28-29
Then Jesus cried out in the temple, teaching and saying, "You both know Me and know where I am from; and I have not come of Myself, but He who sent Me is true, whom you do not know. I know Him, because I am from Him, and He sent Me."John 8:54-55
Jesus answered, "If I glorify Myself, My glory is nothing; it is My Father who glorifies Me, of whom you say, 'He is our God'; and you have not come to know Him, but I know Him; and if I say that I do not know Him, I will be a liar like you, but I do know Him and keep His word."Philippians 3
7But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ.
8More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ,
9and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith,
10that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death;
11in order that I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.Galatians 4:9a But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God,...
John 17:3 "This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.
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Do you know God?
How important is it to you to personally know God?
Is the personal, intimate knowledge of God so valuable to you that everything else in life "doesn't matter" and is considered "rubbish" by comparison?
Do you share Jesus' view of knowing God, that knowing God and Jesus Christ is eternal life?
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