Month: March 2017

For several months I was having a spiritual conversation with a physician friend of mine.  One day in frustration he said, “I don’t get it.  You (and those like you) talk about a personal relationship with Christ.  That doesn’t make sense to me.  How can you have a “personal relationship” with God?”

His response surprised me and made me think how casually I use that term without thinking about it or explaining it.  It does sound strange.  No other religion claims that its followers can relate to God in a personal way.   Wanting to explain the concept, I realized that the phrase “personal relationship” is not used in Scripture….but then neither is the word “Trinity”.   Although the words are not used the concept of relating to God on an individual and personal level is everywhere.  It would be presumptuous, even preposterous, if it were not taught as a reality.

Since this idea is so central to discipleship, let’s stop and see how it is developed in Scripture.

“Knowing” is a term in the New Testament that carries the idea of a personal relationship.  The Greek word is GINOSKO and Vine’s Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words explains it like this:

GIN0SKO (GK) signifies “to be taking in knowledge, to come to know, recognize, understand,” or “to understand completely”.  In the NT (ginosko) frequently indicates a relation between the person “knowing” and the object known; in this respect, what is “known” is of value or importance to the one who knows, and hence the establishment of the relationship.

Jesus refers to knowing him as eternal life.   “This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent” (John 17:3).   The implication is that eternal life is more of a relationship than a place, beginning at the moment of our new birth and lasting throughout eternity.  What if eternal life is the relationship we establish now and the essence of our future life in the new heaven and earth?

So how do we know Christ?  What does knowing mean when dealing with God who is both transcendent and invisible?  The Bible even talks about the possibility of knowing him as we would a personal friend.  How is that possible?

We can better understand the meaning of this relational knowing by comparing it with other things we know.

We can know a rock, for example, by studying its composition.  A microscope, chemicals, and diligence can reveal a great deal of knowledge about a rock.  Geologists can give us the history of the rock, how it was formed, and what it can be used for.  But though well informed, we would not claim to have a relationship with a rock.

Knowing a real person who lived in the past is another form of knowing.  A biographer is one who studies and writes about the life of an historic person so others can know about him or her.  Based on the reliability of the historic records used by the biographer, others can get a reasonably accurate picture of that individual.  But even with all that knowledge, the knowing is not on a relational, personal, or experiential level.

The biblical idea of knowing Christ (God) is more than knowing his composition (character and attributes) or the historic story line (the biblical account).  Rather knowing Christ is similar to how we would know another living person except, of course, that he is invisible.

There are four critical elements that are needed to have a personal relationship with another individual as well as with Jesus Christ.

• Mutual respect
• Consistent dialogue
• Shared experiences
• Authentic transparency

There is a danger that our knowing Christ is more like how we would know a rock or an historical figure.  We study and marvel at his attributes.  We explore his story down through the biblical records and become familiar with what he said and what others said about him.  But we may fail to personally know him through developing a life on life relationship.

In our next blog we will explore the above four relational dynamics in more detail.

For further reflection:  Think about the implications of the following presuppositions:

1. God is knowable and delights in being known (1 John 3:1)
2. God has made it possible to know him through the second person of the Trinity (John 1:18)
3. Knowing God is possible but not automatic (Matt. 7:22-23)
4. Knowing God involves revelation, faith, reason, and relationship (Eph. 1:17-18)

The pursuit of knowing Christ must be a firsthand, personal experience.  There is a wide difference between what is true and what we know is true, between what we say is true and what we embrace in our hearts to be true.  The Scripture tells us what is true about God, but only by experience can we know it for ourselves.  God is not satisfied with our second-hand knowledge; he wants us to know him personally.

“O taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps 34:8).

The testimony of the saints down through history is that God is good.  But we don’t “know” it until we experience it (taste it) through defining moments in our own life journey.

Growing up in mid America in the 1950s, we rarely traveled outside of the state.  The interstate highway system was just being built and traveling cross-country on 2 lane highways was slow and dangerous.  One year our family got a subscription to National Geographic magazine.  The slick layout and colorful pictures was an immediate attraction to me.  I am not sure I ever read any of the articles, but I sure looked at the pictures.   National Geographic took the eyes of my mind to places I never thought I would see in person:  places like the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Glacier National Park.

The following summer my parents announced that we were going to make a road trip to California.  Five of us piled into a 1952 two-door Chevy and headed west on “Route 66.”

Along the way we stopped and saw places we had seen in National Geographic.  I remember looking down from the edge of the Grand Canyon and standing next to a giant Sequoia tree thinking, “The pictures were great but no comparison to seeing it myself.”

In some ways the Scripture is an inspired National Geographic magazine.  It gives us snapshots of men and women in biblical history who encountered God and discovered something about him.  We read the text and vicariously gain a picture of the reality of God as it is illustrated in the lives of the saints of old.  However, that knowledge was never meant to be a substitute for our own experiences.  We, too, should be taking our own pictures and writing our own stories about our personal encounters with God.

John, one of the apostles who walked with the incarnate Son of God, wrote about this principle in his first letter,

From the very first day, we were there, taking it all in—we heard it with our own ears, saw it with our own eyes, verified it with our own hands.  The Word of life appeared right before our eyes; we saw it happen!  And now we’re telling you in most sober prose that what we witnessed was, incredibly, this:  The infinite Life of God himself took shape before us.  We saw it, we heard it, and now we’re telling you so you can experience it along with us, this experience of communion with the Father and his Son, Jesus Christ. (1 John 1:1-3 MSG)

John is telling us that he encountered Christ firsthand.  Now he wants his experience to be ours, taking our own pictures and writing our own story.  Too often as Christians we are just reading or telling other people’s stories about their encounters with Christ.  We have not stepped out by faith and tasted the reality of God though our own experience and story.

The familiar story of Peter walking to Jesus on the water is as amazing to us today as it must have been to the other eleven men sitting in the boat.  I am sure they told this story often as they sat around their family dinner tables.  We may be hard on Peter for his lapse of faith when he took his eyes off Jesus and focused on the storm – resulting in more than just wet feet.  But only one out of the 12 ever actually walked on water!  Peter knew firsthand what they could only talk about.

The apostle Paul summarized his spiritual journey in Philippians 3 when he said, “… I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Phil 3:8).  The “all things” were not just his past claims of righteousness but included his present success of ministry.  Paul was not content with his original understanding of Jesus.  He wanted to continue to personally know him in a deeper way both in experience and knowledge.

Along our journey of discipleship, we will encounter storms that threaten our boat.  The stories of how others met Jesus at their point of need serve as good catalysts to strengthen our faith and give us hope.  However, they can never substitute for our own personal encounters with God.  It is vital that we, too, “taste and see that the Lord is good.”

Reflection:

Think of a defining moment in your life when God showed up.  How did he do it and were you surprised?  What is the picture of God that was created by that encounter?