On Knowing God

I have said:

Men will wrangle 100 hours planning, organizing, marketing, promoting, and gathering the refreshments for one program to assemble a group of heart-guarded believers before they will invest 5 minutes heart-sharing with one friend ... the true and redemptive work of the church.

Charles Caleb Colton said:

Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it; anything but live for it.

Why? WHY is that? WHY do you think that is true? Does it not bother you that the world, the Christ-following world, is like that? Does it alarm us that WE – you and I - are like that?

And what can be done?

A few years ago, I hammered out my ecclesiology. Take a look.

We live to bring glory to God
by building His Kingdom
by becoming like His Son Jesus
by abiding in Him (in other words, “knowing God.”).
All the while we
Love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength;
Love “one another” (the Body of Christ, His church); and
Love “outsiders” (those outside His Body) by fulfilling the Great Commission.

The Church is the Body of Christ, those individuals – Christians – who have been saved by the finished work of Christ on the Cross and have been adopted as children of God, and whose purpose, again, is to bring glory to God by building His Kingdom …;
The collective nature of the church is, in sum, to incarnate God
by bringing the knowledge of God to an un-knowing world
through Encounters with God in
Worship (anything that directly makes much of God),
Community (the fabric of relationships on which life is sewn), and
Service (expressing the love of God by meeting the needs of others).

It is the responsibility of the church to reproduce itself – indeed, it is the nature of survival (analogous to the physical world of plants, animals and humans), making plain the place of for Discipleship (which includes the fundamental ministry of Evangelism) in the building of God’s Kingdom.
The greatest gift that can be offered an un-believer is the gift of eternal life (Evangelism) and to bring that individual to maturity in Christ (Discipleship) through investing Relationships. Thus, that individual becomes a reproduce-er him- or herself, thereby building God’s Kingdom.

Bottom line: You and I, we, do not live for God, do not do the hard work of the gospel, because we don’t want to. And, the reason we don’t want to is because we have a weak, diminished, incomplete and maybe even false knowledge of God. Note: I am not speaking simply of intellectual or cognitive knowledge of God. I am speaking of a “knowledge” that is of the heart and reflects a deep intimacy one with another.

Conversely, were we to know God better, for Who He truly is, it would change the way we live our lives.

Read Paul and the way this principle bears out in his life!

DUH! Read the words of Jesus in His big-time prayer to His Father (John 17:3):

Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.

(ALL CAPS means I’m yellin’!) GET OVER THIS FALSE NOTION THAT “KNOWING GOD” IS THE SAME AS “GETTING SAVED.” A WOMAN DOES NOT KNOW HER HUSBAND FULLY JUST BY GOING THROUGH A 40-MINUTE WEDDING CEREMONY!

I have written much about knowing God. Others have. For this moment I want to condense it into 2 words… COMPANY and COMMUNITY.

You and I have to do the counter-intuitive: We have to keep COMPANY with Jesus (Mt 11:28-30 in The Message). Not DO for Him, primarily. BEING with Him changes our beliefs about Him (Romans 12:2). When this happens, we will nearly automatically DO for Him. Keeping company with Jesus is tantamount to the ancient - and should be contemporary - disciplines of SILENCE and SOLITUDE. God get a copy of Ruth Haley Barton's book titled "Invitation to Solitude and Silence" and READ IT!

Secondly, we get to know Jesus better as we see and experience with Him relationally in the lives of our Christ-believing friends. In a word, COMMUNITY. As you and I INCARNATE Jesus (BE Jesus, in a sense) to and with our friends, we all will, as a result, know God better. It's called life sharing. It is deep, costly, vulnerable friendship.

Another DUH!

All this ain’t easy. Our “old” nature wants to BE God and to live in a little safe and manageable shell. By the way, this is why RELIGION works – you can go to heaven and stay in control at the same time! Another lie.

COMPANY and COMMUNITY is hard work. It will be painful. That is why Hebrews 12:3 says “Consider Jesus.” The Greek word is the word from which we get analogy. We are to analogize Jesus – compare ourselves to Him, the Supreme Sacrifice. Jesus gave His life so others could know the Father. It caused Him immeasurable pain. You and I have the same honor as Jesus.

We can KNOW the Father, become like the Son (know imcomparable JOY – John 15:11), in fact, we can become Son’s ourselves (John 1:12)!, inherit eternal life, and participate in the building of God’s kingdom here on earth.

DUH!