To Know God

“I want to know Christ and experience the mighty power that raised Him from the dead. I want to suffer with Him, sharing in His death, so that one way or another I will experience the resurrection from the dead!” (Philippians 3:10-11 NLT)

Just as there is a closeness, an intimacy God designed for a man and a woman to experience in marriage, so there is an intimacy that God desires to have with us that supersedes the beauty and closeness of any human relationship. In Genesis 4:1 the Bible says that “Adam knew Eve…and she conceived.” The word Paul used in the verse above is the Greek equivalent to the Hebrew word used in Genesis.

It can also mean “to learn to know, come to know, get a knowledge of, perceive” (Strong’s). God’s design is for one man and one woman to pursue one another, almost like in a race, with the growing desire to know him or her completely, to have full knowledge of them. But, more specifically to discover with that one person what God desires to be experienced over a lifetime together, to share exclusive “rights” to one another the gift of sex.

Our culture, including many within the church, has chosen to violate the plan of God and pursue sex without any real desire to learn about the person with whom that sacred gift is shared. We act as though the prize is the act, not the person with whom the act is shared, thus, the high divorce rate, resulting from a greater desire for physical pleasure than the emotional satisfaction of being committed to one person for life. Building a marriage on sex is like trying to build a relationship with Jesus on emotion. It might be fun for a while, but it won’t last.

Because of the shallowness of our understanding of the purpose, not simply the pleasure of sex, we miss the point of Paul’s words in verse 11 above. We settle for the shallowness of emotionalism in “celebrating” our Lord in worship, and don’t hear what I’m not saying. Often, I experience emotion in worship, but it’s not the pleasure of the feelings I’m pursuing, it’s the Lord who sanctifies those feelings.

William Barclay wrote: “To know Christ is not to be skilled in any theoretical or theological knowledge; it is to know him with such intimacy that in the end we are as united with him as we are with those whom we love on earth and that, as we share their experiences, so we also share his.”

In this season of my life, the Lord has opened my heart and life to a new dimension of love and affection, not only for my Savior, but from Him. While working on a project unrelated to “spiritual” things, I was struggling trying to remember how to do what a few months ago was second nature. I literally spent hours trying to figure it out, then asked the Lord, as a child asks his father, “Father, would you help me with this?”   

It was as if His hands were guiding mine, enabling me to do the right thing, gaining the right result in minutes, rather than hours. When I realized what He was doing tears began to roll down my cheeks and the sense of His presence was more real than any human experience. It’s something I’ve longed to experience, but have been too bent on doing things myself, so, I’ve missed it.

To know Christ is to hear His voice and to recognize His presence, but here’s the deal, He’s ALWAYS with us, the issue isn’t Jesus, it’s me, it’s us. I don’t hear because I’m not listening; I don’t experience His presence more often because I’m not in tune with His Spirit’s leadership; I haven’t come to the end of myself. I/we won’t come to know the Lord Jesus in the sense of which Paul speaks until we come to the end of ourselves and learn to rely totally on Him.

Food for thought.

Blessings, Ed 😊