“What were we made for? To know God.
What aim should we set ourselves in life? To know God.
What is the ‘eternal life’ that Jesus gives? Knowledge of God (John 17:3).
What is the best thing in life, bringing more joy, delight and contentment than anything else? Knowing God. (Jeremiah 9:23-24).
What, of all the states that God ever sees us in, gives him the most pleasure? That we know him (Hosea 6:6).”
This passage from Knowing God by J.I.Packer (in my mind the best book about God – apart from the Bible obviously) , is inspiring and challenging in equal measure!
Here is the Great Prize of Christianity. People like you and I – ordinary people (in the main!); everyday sinners; flawed and broken people – are invited to know God! If this doesn’t take our breath away then we haven’t ever seriously thought about it!
Jim Packer goes on to emphasise that this is no impersonal, at-a-distance knowing. Like we know the Queen. Or David Beckham. Or The Pope. It feels like we know them because they get so much attention in the news and our culture. But really we don’t (unless of course you do, in which case, can you get me an autograph?).
No. Packer insists that “Knowing God is a matter of personal dealing” and a matter of “personal involvement”. For all the risks of emotionalism, “we must not lose sight of the fact that knowing God is an emotional relationship, as well as involving our intellects and our wills. It could not be a deep relationship between persons were it not so”.
Amazing. And yet.
Here’s the best bit.
‘Knowing God’ may be the prize of being a Christian, but it is not the root.
Were we to be rooted in our love for God and our ability to know him, we would always struggle and fall short. All by ourselves, we’re just not up to it in the long haul. No, our stability and nurture as Christians – the place we are rooted – is in the fact that God knows us. That He loves us. That He wants us.
“What matters supremely:”, writes Packer, “is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact that underlies it, that He knows me. I know him because he first knew me, and continues to know me. I am engraved on the palms of his hands. I am never out of his mind. He knows me as a friend, one who loves me; and there is no moment when his eye is off me, or His attention distracted from me, and no moment therefore, when his care falters”.
Read that again. Then again. Let it sink in a bit. Then read it again until it’s got you to where you have to shout Hallelujah’, or cry, or laugh, or tell someone, or pray or jump up and down.
To slightly mangle Chris Tomlin’s powerful song:
Indescribable, uncontainable,
All powerful, untameable,
You are amazing God!
You placed the stars in the sky… yet You know ME by name!
That’s where our life is rooted if we are a Christian. Unshakeable, unmovable foundations: rooted in God’s desire to know us as a friend and to love us as his child.