“Grace and peace be yours in abundance through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.” (2 Peter 1:2-4)
In Knowing God, Part 1, we saw that the above Bible text teaches that simply knowing God is the key to peace, grace, and everything we need for life and godliness (see Web Address) However, this seems like such a large order for something that appears so simple! After all, don’t most people know about God?
The answer is “yes”. Most people do know about God. In fact, the Bible tells us that even the demons know God (James 2:19 — “You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that-and shudder.”)! Yet, we can be sure that grace, peace, divine power, and everything needed for life and godliness are not available to them!
So perhaps simply knowing about God isn’t exactly what this text is talking about! No, Peter is talking about a more intimate knowledge of God — a knowledge that comes from loving God, from communing with Him, from placing trust in Him, from spending time with Him. Peter is referring to a heartfelt knowledge of God!
A few years back, I spent a year taking college courses in Austria (okay. Maybe it was more than a “few” years . . .). One of the courses I took was on architectural styles. I had a bit of an attitude problem about this course before I ever started it. Let’s face it: Architectural styles sounded like just about the driest subject I could have ever hoped to study! And of course, when you’ve got your mind set that something will be a certain way (in this case, dry!), than chances are, that’s exactly how you will find it. Guess what? I found it dry. Boring. Dull. Let’s face it. I couldn’t stay awake in class!
We did have a good teacher, though, one who was passionate about architecture and who really knew his stuff. And we had great books, so full of pictures, that the fact that they were written in German didn’t really cause much of a hindrance. But nothing made the subject any less dry! Nothing made it easier to remember if the Baroque Period was the period of fat baby angels, or if it was really the Romantic Period, or perhaps one of the others, whose names I never seemed to be able to master!
Then, one day, our teacher took us on a field trip. We headed north, towards Vienna, but along the way, we stopped at several ancient churches. As we entered each church, my teacher first took a moment to explain to us which period this particular building was from, then proceeded to point out all the architectural “clues” that placed it in that period.
I will never fully understand what happened to me on that trip, but I came back to campus finally understanding what each period was all about! And not only that, but somewhere along the way, I seemed to have forgotten how “dry” it all had seemed, just 12 hours earlier! Why? Because I hadn’t just learned about architecture, I had also experienced architecture! Things changed for me after that day. I began to hunger and thirst for more information about architecture!
Not long afterwards, I took a trip to Greece. Now, our course work hadn’t even touched ancient architecture, but this didn’t daunt me a bit. I was sure that just experiencing ancient Greek architecture would be all it took for me to know all there was about it! But I was in for a big disappointment. Not long into the trip, I became aware that nothing I saw really resembled anything but piles of ruined rock! It didn’t mean anything to me because I didn’t know anything about what I was seeing!
Things changed, however, the day I took a tour of the Acropolis in Ancient Athens. We were fortunate enough to latch onto a tour. The tour guide was quite knowledgeable, pointing to each and every “pile of rocks” and making it come alive with history and information about the time period. Simply leaning up against a temple doorway had a whole new meaning, now that I knew just what kind of a temple it was, what time period it came from, and what famous person from History might have stood right where I was standing thousands of years earlier.
Throughout these two experiences, I learned that to really “know” something, you must study about it, listen to others who have already experienced what you desire to know about, and you must experience it yourself!
It is exactly the same with our Lord, my friends! To really experience Him, we must both study about Him, we must fellowship with others who are getting to know Him, and finally, and perhaps most importantly, we must spend time getting to know Him personally — we must experience Him!
To learn more about how to get to know God, see Sunday’s edition of The Illustrator, for Knowing God, Part 3.
God bless you as you get to know Him!
Love in Christ,
Lyn
Lyn Chaffart, Moderator, The Nugget, Scriptural Nuggets ( www.scripturalnuggets.org ), Answers2Prayer Ministries, www.Answers2Prayer.org
(To access the entire “Knowing God” mini-series, please click here.)