To Know God Better

There are five parts to any good plan to replace the god of the imagination with the God That Is.

I mean this essay to elaborate on this promise:

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. [Matthew 7:7-8 (NIV).]

1. Humility.

God is vast. The first step to know him better is to know that there is more that we don’t know than what we do know. If we know that we are largely ignorant, then hubris won’t stop the flow of knowledge of God into our hearts and minds.

If we don’t know how incomplete our knowledge is, then we need to just assume that our knowledge is incomplete and proceed. As we gather more knowledge, we become aware of our prior ignorance. That will help us know that we need to build upon our knowledge of God.

It’s like a wilderness hiker who sees a peak in the distance. Every time the hiker advances on a peak, the hiker discovers a new peak behind the one that appeared before. In time, the hiker comes to assume that the farther he or she hikes, the more he or she will discover.

2. Effort.

A lot can be learned without much effort. It takes little effort to use bare hands to stick naked wires into an electrical socket. But that exercise will cause learning.

And sometimes knowledge of God comes with little conscious effort. Sometimes it comes as inspiration while we are thinking about something else. Maybe your love for your children teaches you about the love of God. C.S. Lewis wrote of a military pilot who flew across the desert at night and encountered a sense of the mystery of God.

But many of our greatest skills come from deliberate learning. We learned to read in school, and it took many years to achieve our present skill at reading. The same is true of writing and math. And I think that there is no job that doesn’t have a learning curve. A seasoned worker is almost always superior to a novice.

Knowledge of God is like that. Knowledge of God is improved through effort. That effort can be reading the Bible with a curious mind. Or hearing sermons by mature Christians. Or listening to hymns. (I have a strong preference for the old hymns; I’m old-fashioned that way.)

Effort can be reading books by spiritual giants, or at least by persons further along in knowledge of God than we are. It can be taking time to meditate on the nature of God. It can be talking about God with our friends.

Michael Phelps is a champion swimmer. Some have called him the greatest swimmer who ever lived. He has vast natural talent. But that natural talent wouldn’t have made him the most winning athlete in Olympic history if he hadn’t driven himself to swim countless laps with great effort. That effort rewarded him.

We might never be the spiritual equivalent of Michael Phelps. But it’s probably also true that we will benefit from every effort that we make to better know God.

3. Persistence.

Michael Phelps probably had times when felt like not going to workout. If he had worked out for a few years but then quit or took it easier, he might have benefitted from that, but he wouldn’t have become the athletic phenomenon that he became. Persistence pays off in the pursuit of knowledge of God, too.

But there’s a difference between Michael Phelps’s pursuit of athletic victory and our pursuit of knowledge of God. Athletes have a relatively small window in which to be Olympic heroes. Dara Torres has lasted longer than most. But now that she’s in her forties, her Olympic time is over.

But as long as we have healthy minds, nothing holds us back from learning more about God. To study about him for a year is good. To study about him for a decade is better. To study about him for a lifetime is best.

4. Grace.

What I just said is almost true. Let me take a little of it back.

The Westboro Baptist Church puzzles me. That’s the church that pickets the funerals of American soldiers who have died in war.

I’ve looked at their website. I’ve listened to a sermon by their pastor. They lack neither knowledge of the Bible nor zeal. But their message is a message of hate, and that makes me doubt their knowledge of God.

So even with zeal and effort and persistence, we might make grave errors about the nature of God. Zeal and effort and persistence can make us proud, which is the opposite of humility, which is necessary for knowledge of God.

So we need to persist in prayers for ourselves and for our friends and loved ones that our zeal and our effort and our persistence won’t be wasted. And hopefully the grace of God will be with us.

5. Love.

Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. [1 John 4:7-8.]

Again to speak of Westboro Baptist Church, I hazard a guess that love is the quality that they lack that makes them bray instead of sing to the glory of God.

I love imperfectly. That limits my ability to speak about it. But I picture it as the roof on the four walls of knowledge of God: humility, effort, persistence, and grace.

I’m not a carpenter, so it’s probably dangerous for me to use a carpentry metaphor. But it seems to me that you can start with a roof and raise walls under it. Or you can build the walls and then install the roof over them. But, like I say, I’m not a carpenter.

I envy the person who is filled with love to build knowledge of God on. But if we don’t feel love, we can do acts of love, and the feeling will come by the grace of God.

And if we love, as John said, we will know God.