The longer I live the Christian life, the more certain I am that knowing God personally is the key to everything we ever hoped would come of a decision to follow Christ.

Experience tells me the enduring joy, strength, wisdom, abundant life, and peace Jesus promised cannot be produced by human effort. At least, I could never manufacture those things. When I grew tired of striving for these things I finally gave up trying, and in desperation cried to God,

“What am I missing here?”

The Lord answered my cry, in short order.

Not merely in words, but through marvelous coincidences, thoughts permeating my night hours, and a unique Christian who never seemed plagued by boredom, dryness or doubt in his walk. Altogether, God’s answers led me to abandon my own efforts and invite God the Spirit to fill me up entirely. It was humbling, and a little scary. For about five minutes.

This was the beginning of a truly interactive relationship with the Spirit of God.

The Holy Spirit changed everything.

My love and wonder for Him grew deeper every day. It wasn’t about me trying to be a good Christian anymore; it was about stepping into a relationship with the most wonderful Being ever.

To this day, over 30 years later, I still marvel that the perfectly holy and all-powerful creator of all things wants to share Himself with me. Especially after all I’ve done (before and after salvation) that should have horrified Him away from me forever.

But He won’t leave, or be put off. He never stops offering His unconditional forgiveness, or His tender love and encouragement.

What I’ve taken away from these years of knowing God is that personal relationship is His plan to heal, father, and teach His children. It is the means by which his Kingdom will be established. I firmly believe that knowing God is the highest joy we can have on earth, and the means by which every Bible promise is fulfilled. Knowing God is how we end up with abundant life instead of lifeless religion.

Tasting God’s Goodness

I have tasted the Lord in wondrous, flawed, challenging and satisfying ways since He won my heart in 1979. Experiencing His goodness in daily life IS my joy, my strength, my rest, my wisdom, my hope and my inspiration to keep trying when I fail.

I could never produce these things on my own; they come with HIM. Jesus said it like this when he prayed to the Father:

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

John 17:3

Neither Jesus nor the New Testament writers spoke of eternal life as if it begins only after death. Eternal life begins for the believer the moment he or she joins to the Lord.

We easily assume eternal life refers to life after earth, but it truly, simply means what it says: life that never ends. I believe God planted the seed of that life in your human spirit the moment you became one with Christ.

Everything we could pack into a definition of abundant life — satisfaction of heart, nourishing relationship, the wisdom and ability to fulfill our potential — flows out of knowing God. And when God gives himself to you in relationship, He never takes himself back.

The Purpose of Faith

The Scriptures reveal we were not given the gift of faith to just believe IN God. The purpose of faith is to enable us to live our lives here as a response to His invisible but real Presence — Emmanuel, God with us.

Millions believe in God and in his Son, and are taught about God, yet many never learn to apply that faith towards the organic process of getting to know the God who has come to dwell within.

Faith is necessary to approach God in the way He has prescribed — in true childlikeness. When you believe what God has said — that it really is His pleasure to give the kingdom to his children — that we can relax into knowing we are really accepted by Him.

It takes faith to trust that the Holy Spirit is really your constant companion, is ready to actively direct your heart, and willing to reveal God’s thoughts to you. We have many witnesses to these things in Scripture, yet struggle to take God at His Word. It all feels too good to be true. It seems irreverent to many to draw near to God in a familiar, familial way. Yet this is His clearly stated will. We were made to know God, and find our best life in union with Him.

My book, They Will All Know Me, explains that our salvation is actually a covenant that calls us to know God.

In this covenant God promises He Himself will make it all possible. It contains stories of my own experiences in knowing God by faith. I have never literally seen God or heard His audible voice or seen the couch cushions flatten because He is sitting next to me. I simply believe He is Present, and respond to Him accordingly. I believe He is far more attentive to me than I am to Him.

I heard once that someone with an experience is not at the mercy of someone with an argument. In other words, you can’t talk me out of what I believe, because I’m living it.

I’m not even close to being a perfect Christian, but I know my God. No doubt I know only a mere fraction of what is knowable about Him, but that fraction is a tree of life to me! I enjoy my God, and I never, ever feel alone. Even more importantly, I feel cherished by Him. I assure you, that is not a sensation I drummed up on my own.

The Scriptures first gave me hope in such realities

Which is why I insist Christians should read the Word of God, and read it all. God has laid His heart bare in those pages; to neglect the Bible is to neglect God’s heart. Not to mention that failure to become familiar with the Word of God robs you of vital life-changing truth.

The Calling of Every Christian: Know your God

The Bible consistently validates that sharing life with God is both a privilege and a calling. In fact, to live worthy of the calling (Ephesians 4:1, Colossians 1:10) is to act on what God is truly offering, and not shrink back in fear or doubt. The Bible writers assure us that God delights in the one who comes boldly, who seeks to know and taste of God.

Scripture is also clear that God is not pleased with the one who is timid, fearful or otherwise makes excuses about it all being too hard. These truths are tucked away in sticky-page places like Habakkuk.

To be sure, there is a tension to be maintained in knowing God: between the reverence due our Creator King, and the childlike intimacy the Father invites us to enjoy.

How can that be?

I think this because only in truly tasting of God — experiencing His invisible but very real presence — will your love, reverence and passion to obey Him naturally increase, in a way that you own it. You don’t have to be forced or talked into it. Instead of a command you make yourself obey, true fear and worship of the Lord comes naturally.

To know the Lord is to love Him, naturally.

Though it is right to honor God through worship, by choice and devotion, I think He values most the kind of worship that is a genuine and irrepressible response to what His child sees of Him and knows of His heart through personal encounter.

Every day I encounter Christians who shrink back from knowing God for fear of being not good enough, or not surrendered enough; who don’t have permission to be familiar with God. Or who believe they must achieve a certain level of spiritual maturity before God will walk and talk with them.

In this, we have misunderstood God’s plan; we do it backwards.

It is relationship with God that brings us to maturity, not the other way around.

As I relax into hanging out with God as I would a friend, brother or father, I look more like Him, naturally. I am taught, mentored, strengthened. I learn the wisdom of timing by observing how the Lord responds to people and situations. In the olden days before I knew the Lord and His Spirit, I figured it all out on my own — with predictable results. I thank God that He did not rescue me from those results, because they actually drove me to Him.

Relationship Was Always God’s Plan For Building A Kingdom

I’m on a mission to convince people of this, to come against the lie the devil has fostered: that believers have to EARN God’s favor, His voice and His presence before they can know Him in any real way this side of heaven.

Certainly, there are steps we should take to prepare for this relationship, but God has made sure we can do them all, by His grace and His Spirit.

As I say often, whatever experience you have with God is by your choice, and God’s power. He won’t choose for you, because He gave you free will. But when you exercise your will to choose knowing Him, He steps up with all the power you need to do so. Because it was always His idea.

My weekly encounters with Christians reinforce the importance of speaking and writing more about these things. I join the chorus of voices out there who are singing the same tune, because so many people are still captive, still timid, and still reaching for satisfaction from the world because they don’t realize how very much God can truly satisfy them.

I am not qualified to write of these things because I live it perfectly, but because I have tested what I teach in my own daily life for over thirty years. I have come to know this amazing God who keeps leaping over all my flaws and weaknesses to love me with all His heart, and I want others to know Him as they can, for their joy and for His glory.

Today I have unwavering faith that God the Spirit is present with me. Long ago the question of “Where are you, God?” was replaced with “How should I respond to Your Presence?”

I’d love to know what question you are asking today about sharing life with God; please post them to me in the comments section at the bottom of this post.