They Will All Know Me is the fourth book I’ve written. While I obviously believe the first three books are very valuable for any Christian who wants to grow in knowing the Lord, I am most excited about this one.

The response to this book has surprised even me. Some of the team who helped me edit the book ordered it by the case when it was published so they could give a copy to everyone they love or mentor. And even though they had each read it, they couldn’t wait to read it again!

People tell me how it plugs into their hunger for something more with God, something that has eluded them thus far. People are finding hope in They Will All Know Me that they can know God, and that knowing Him will nourish them in all the ways they have been left hungry.

Jesus doesn’t just love you, He LOVES you!

The overarching message of They Will All Know Me is that God wants to share life with you…. NOW! I believe He wanted this book written to give hope to hungry hearts who have been left malnourished by the current model and mode of church and Christianity, which often teaches ABOUT God more than how to really KNOW God.

Eternal life with the Father is the prize for which Jesus suffered. As the Son of God, He wanted to offer the Father the inheritance among men for which He longed. As the Son of Man — a human being like us — Jesus wanted us to have the joy of knowing the Father as He knew the Father.

In John 17:2-3 Jesus defined eternal life as knowing the Father and Jesus Christ. They Will All Know Me aims to share the full message of this new life. I wrote it with the abiding hope that those who read it would never again be able to settle for anything less than knowing God in personal experience.

In its pages you will find a robust collection of Scriptures which makes the case for knowing God now. It is peppered with personal stories of how I have learned to know God so far, and how knowing Him has changed my heart and life like no other thing or person could.

They Will All Know Me focuses on knowing God as a Person, the heart that beats behind the roles of king, father, friend and savior.

I still remember the early Christian days when I thought of God as an ethereal being far away: unknowable, unreachable, too majestic to treat as a familiar friend.

But I kept reading those Scriptures which confronted me daily with the Person who is God; with His profound and relentless desire to share life with His creation. I eventually began to relax about the idea that God really did want to relate to us as friend, as Jesus told His disciples:

I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.

John 15:15 (NIV)

However, I couldn’t truly wrap myself around this concept until I began to see Him as a person. A person with desires, hopes, a will, a personality, a sense of humor.

While I’d struggled to make myself over in His image, I overlooked the fact that I was already made in His image. I crave justice because He loves justice. I need to be loved because He wants to be loved. I get angry at betrayal because He gets angry at betrayal. I feel jealousy because He feels jealousy.

These things emboldened me to go for the relationship I saw described in the Bible.

Like many, I began with the faulty notion that I had to be good enough or spiritual enough or holy enough to actually receive that. The Holy Spirit persistently cured me of that notion, as I learned to walk with Him in daily life. Instead, the Spirit highlighted the fact that Jesus said we come to know God best through taking a childlike posture before God: He is my true Father, I am His beloved child. Learning to rest in that took some time, but when I did, my nearness to God increased greatly.

I write at some length about this process in They Will All Know Me. It is true that we should be good, spiritual and holy like our heavenly Father. What the Spirit taught me is that we can only become these things as we are mentored up close and personal. So many, like me, have gone at it backwards: trying to earn the relationship, instead of simply believing in the relationship offered, like any legitimate child does, and let Father raise me up in His values.

This shift in focus tilted the axis of my world, away from focusing on my performance, and directly into the heart of God. What a joy it is to experience God’s heart in daily life!

The other thing that convinced me: the covenant basis for our relationship to God.

The Bible is filled with references to covenant relationship, and learning about this underlying framework transformed my concept of Christianity and my relationship to God. Why? God has chosen to relate to his creation through covenant values and commitment, including and especially in The New Covenant of Christ. I share the basics of biblical covenant in They Will all Know Me, because our new covenant is based upon God’s covenant promise, first delivered through the mouth of Jeremiah, and later validated by the New Testament book of Hebrews as the basis for our salvation:

“But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days,” declares the Lord, “I will put My law within them and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. They will not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them,” declares the Lord, “for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.”

Jeremiah 31:33-34 (NASB)

The topic of covenant is not taught enough to Christians. Frankly, I think it should be presented as Christianity 101, because explains why a holy God, the King of Kings, and an ordinary redeemed human being can share life as committed friends. It is God’s sworn word, and your legal right given by Him to come into genuine fellowship. It’s a magnificent, life-changing topic.

You can read more about They Will All Know Me and view the Table of Contents here.