Experiencing God No.1 The Great Possibility

That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maidservants, and his eleven sons, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions. So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak.

When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob's hip, so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. Then the man said, Let me go, for it is daybreak. But Jacob replied, I will not let you go unless you bless me.

The man asked him, What is your name? Jacob, he answered. Then the man said, Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with men, and have overcome. Jacob said, Please tell me your name.

But he replied, Why do you ask my name? Then he blessed him there. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared. The sun rose above him as he passed Peniel, and he was limping because of his hip.

Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the tendon attached to the socket of the hip, because the socket of Jacob's hip was touched near the tendon. Now may God add his blessing to that reading from his holy word. As fools have wanted to play Hamlet, so I have wanted to write a book about God.

So says Dr. Packer in the volume that I recommended a few moments ago. And what I wish to do this morning is, if you will understand me right, engage in the same foolery to which Dr. Packer confesses. For I want to speak to you about God, and not just the person of God, or basically the attributes of God.

But rather, and perhaps if I dare argue this even more personally, and even more importantly, I want to talk to you about experiencing God. Experiencing God. So we're looking at God not in terms of a theological concept, but rather as an experimental issue.

Something that you and I, someone that you and I can know, some experience that you and I can share. It says A.W. Tozer, it cannot but be a major tragedy in life, in the life of any man, to live in a church from childhood to old age, and know nothing more than some synthetic God, compounded of theology and logic, but having no eyes to see, no ears to hear, no heart to love. There are, alas, those in evangelical churches who may have all their doctrine exact, but their experience of the living God leaves them as barren as the desert of the Sahara.

To know the word of God, I argue carefully, deliberately, weighing every aspect of truth at this moment, to know the word of God is not in itself sufficient to be a Bible-believing Christian. The word of God is a vehicle to take us to the God of the word, and if you stop short at the former and do not go on to the latter, then you are buying less than the Christian faith. You are settling for something that is not on a par with New Testament experience.

To have a theology and not a theophany is to do less than the Bible suggests is an inheritance, an entry into your right as a Christian. Theology is the word of God. Theophany is the experience of God.

It was Ezekiel, you remember, who on one occasion had a vision of dry bones in a valley, and from the mouth of that illustrious servant of God came the declaration, came the suggestion, came the heart cry, cannot these dry bones live? And there's many a skeletal frame that has fallen over an evangelical pew, slumped across Sunday by Sunday, who represents the bones of Ezekiel's vision. And the cry of the sensitive person must always be, cannot these bones live? Instead of a mere theology, a word of God, cannot there be a theophany, an experience of the God of the word? What I share this morning is not a message from my books, but a heart cry from my breast. Experience of God is my topic and a realization of that is my target.

Do you remember when Pilgrim sets off in Bunyan's famous allegory of Christian's progress? When Christian sets off, he has to put his hands upon his ears so that the cries of those who would keep him back in the place where he was naturally might be deafened somewhat, and from his mouth came the words life, life, as he leaves the place of his natural environment and sets off on that long journey that ultimately leads to the celestial city. And it's with that same grim determination I suggest to you that you must approach the subject that's forefront this morning for our consideration, deafen your ears to all that would keep you earthbound, that would anchor you in terms of materialism and the life that the earthling here lives, and from your lips let there be the cry life, life, I must have more of God as for me and my house we will serve the Lord, for me to live is Christ, says the apostle Paul, that I might know him. This is my one single aim, my one motivation in life, to know him.

And that is the most commendable thing, for if you're bankrupt of the knowledge of God then you're bankrupt, full stop, there is nothing else worth looking into, there is nothing else worth experiencing but God. Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom or the strong man boast of his strength or the rich man boast of his riches, but let him who boasts boast about this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord, says the prophet Jeremiah, speaking for God. And he is setting his own seal on that particular injunction is our blessed Lord, who in his high priestly prayer says this in John's gospel in the 17th chapter, now this is eternal life, that they may know you the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.

This is life eternal, not to know God experimentally, to know God only academically is to fall short, is to refuse to enter into the inheritance that is yours. God both knows and wishes to be known. Of Moses, God says, I knew you by name.

Of Jeremiah, the Lord said, I knew you even before you were formed in your mother's womb. And it's the blessed Lord Jesus who, speaking of his disciples, says the good shepherd knows his sheep. God knows me.

But that is not sufficient. I am to know God. And if I fail there, I fail everywhere.

If I'm poverty stricken there, I'm a pauper at every level. I can hear someone replying, but I know God. I know him through his word.

And yes, I would agree that God does communicate himself through the Bible. But the Bible is a vehicle. I speak carefully and tenderly.

I love this book. I'm a beaver for this book. I am to this book what an alcoholic might be to spirit.

You cannot keep me away from it. But it is possible for this book to be a mere vehicle. And when you look inside the vehicle, there is no driver, there is no passenger, there is no one there to meet with.

And if that is your experience, then you're with the quackery of the cults who too come to this book, but they do not know the living God through the page. Ours as evangelicals is not to make a God out of the Bible, but to seek through the Bible the living God. And if you don't find him, then as I say, you're in a pitiful condition.

I add that to seek God alone through commentaries, though they be written by very devotionally minded men, to seek God through Hebrew and Greek lexicons, though the scholarship be most erudite and excellent, is but to seek the living amongst the dead, if as a result of your search, you are not brought face to face in a holy encounter with a God of glory. I crave to know God, to know him more. Man cannot love a God who is just a mere deduction from a text.

I can prove to you certain aspects of Christian theology and you might agree with me, but your very agreement doesn't carry you into an experience of God. God is more than just being acquainted in your mind with certain things concerning his attributes. To know God is to fall in love with God, it is to feel him, it is to know the touch of God upon the soul.

And if you don't know that, then I repeat, your condition is pitiful. And be you ever so careful an attender at an evangelical church, you are still as hopeless and as lacking in spiritual qualification as the man or the woman who never darkens the doorstep of a church such as this. Can God be known in an intimate, personal way? Or does Faber mock us when he writes, how wonderful, how wonderful the sight of thee must be, the endless wisdom boundless love and awful purity.

Can man be caused to quiver as a leaf in the breeze as God blows his spirit upon him? Can man enter into the presence of God where according to the Bible there is fullness of joy and at his right hand are pleasures for evermore? Can man know the rapture of the soul where his contact with God is so real that it is a far better relationship to enjoy than contact with any other person be they ever so beloved on this earth? Is the Bible using merely poetic terms when it says draw near unto me and I will draw near unto you? Was Jesus just engaging in some hypothetical concept when he said through the inspired writer of the Hebrew epistle, I will never leave you nor forsake you? Was the psalmist being tricked by God when he penned the words, if you seek me you shall find for me, you shall find me if you search for me with all your heart? A concept that's also reproduced in the book of Jeremiah. I answer this, that the Bible is not engaged in trickery. This is not just an excursion into literary concepts which have got no flesh and blood, so to speak, experience basic to them.

Can God be known? My answer is yes, he can be known, he can be known personally. Known as much as I know my wife, as much as I remember my father, as much as I love my mother. Our God is capable of being known and not to know this God is to live at a level which reduces you to the the type of life of an animal who is not in touch with its creator.

God can be known. I refuse to sit under the ministry of any man who will not agree to this. As Carlyle once commented, my teacher must know God more than just by hearsay.

And as Tozer followed up, if a man has only correct doctrine to offer me, I am sure to slip out at the first intermission and seek the company of someone who has seen for himself how lovely is the face of his who is the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valleys. Let me tell you this, God can be known and we are not impoverished nor disadvantaged by the fact that we do not live in the day of Abraham or the day of Paul. There are those who think if only God had called us into existence yesteryear, then we would have known him grandly.

If only God had been with us or we had been with God or we had sojourned with Abraham centuries back, then we might have known him in a way that we don't know him now. If only we had lived during the times of the apostles, then our intimate relationship with God might have been superb and far greater than we know right now. Says one writer, we should seek to be cleansed of the childish notion that those were better times, that God was more available then.

God is the great I am. He is the one who changes not. Eternity with all its years stands present in thy view.

To thee there's nothing old appears great God. There's nothing new. In God's day there never was such a thing as a past hour or a future hour.

There is only an eternal present. The God who revealed himself on the plain of Mamre to Abraham, the God who unhorsed Paul on the Damascus road is our God who never changes and who longs for you to have an experience with him that is superior to any other experience possible on this earth. If anything, we have the advantage over Abraham.

Though Abraham lived to see the day of Christ inasmuch as he had some vision of what God would achieve through Jesus, he never had a full Bible. In many senses we have the advantage over Paul. He was still working out the implications of the theology of the cross, but now we have it all inscripturated.

Here in this book the Christ speaks. Do not speak of the Bible in terms of God's word of yesterday. It is a living word of God which endures and abides forever.

Heaven and earth may pass away, but this word will not pass away. It is always contemporary. It is always up to date.

Through this word and this word alone, God speaks and he speaks personally and dynamically and he speaks experimentally to those who will listen and put into practice what he has to say. The Christ who walked through the gospel story walks in the life of the believer in the 20th century and knowing him then is the same as knowing him now. I say some but this knowledge of God of which you eloquently speak this morning is reserved for special people.

The Madame Guillaumes of this world, the Brother Lawrences, these great men and women of God of past days, George Whitfield and the like. God has a special breed and to those he reveals himself not a bit. The Bible says that God has no favorites.

He has his intimates but he has no favorites and the intimacy which God affords to men and women he does so on at a comprehensive level so that anyone within the body of Christ can know him in an intimate way. It has nothing to do with the magnitude of the brain but the largeness of the heart. John Calvin and John Owen were two of the great Johns of historical theology.

Hardly any have come to grips with God and the knowledge of God academically as did John Calvin and John Owen was of the same ilk, of the same stamina, of the same gift. Now there was a great deal of difference between the intellectual ability of Calvin and Owen compared with that shall we say of Bunyan who I quoted a little while ago compared with that of Billy Bray. But can you say that John Calvin and John Owen knew God more than John Bunyan or Billy Bray? You see the idea of God of entering into a knowledge of God is not dependent on your intellectual ability rather it's dependent as I said before on the largeness of your heart.

I remember some while ago ministering in Latin America. I was on the deck of the doulos, the private apartment of the of the captain. I was there just meditating during the afternoon and someone else intruded on my privacy and I was glad because the captain's deck became a Bethel and I had an awareness of God from a brother's testimony the like of which I have rarely experienced.

He wasn't a young man, he was a man in his mid-50s. He was not a preacher, he was a mechanic and he started to tell me that afternoon something of his story. He'd been driving his car 10 years or so ago in I believe California and he crashed his car.

In his car was his beloved wife and also his daughters. His wife died as a result of the car smash and I understand this that though this man went through great difficulties, through great problems, he had such an encounter and a repeated encounter of the living God that he had this to say to me on board the doulos, there are times when I enter into my small cabin and standing before the porthole I cannot do anything. I cannot get down on my knees.

I just stand and I gaze and I gaze and I'm filled with such a sense of the wonder and the glory of God. He has been so great to me. He has been so good to me and every word that he used was charged with sincerity as he laid bare his heart and told me something of the experience of God.

A man that you will never know. A man whose name will never be on the history books. I tell you that this knowledge of God is not for special people alone.

God has no favorites but as I mentioned he does have his intimates and intimacy with God is available to you and to me. Let me go on and add this point that knowledge of God and the experiencing of God is a life's work. It is a life's work.

It is not something that is easily obtained. It demands all from us. It demands our time and our talents.

God has not bowed says one writer to our nervous haste nor embrace the methods of the machine age. It is well that we must accept this hard truth that the man who would know God must give him time. How much time do you give to this God? Said Amsalm writing decades, centuries ago.

Up now you slight man. Hide thyself for a time from thy disturbing thoughts. Cast aside now thy burdensome cares and put away thy toilsome business.

Yield room for some little time to God and rest for a little time in him. Enter the inner chamber of thy mind. Shut out all thoughts save of God and such as can aid thee in seeking him.

Speak now my whole heart. Speak now to God saying I seek thy face. Thy face Lord will I seek.

Experiencing God is a demanding thing. You do not immediately move in like that. There is no sensational experience that you can have which will lift you onto that plane so that you can never fall down again.

Experiencing God is the pursuit of a lifetime and it is the most important pursuit along which you can engage your energies. Experiencing God I argue is a necessary work. I must know him.

You must know him my friend because the day will come when you will know no one else but God. You may have been helped by your Christian friends along life's journey. You may have good companions, a good husband, a good wife, a very close Christian associate but the day will come when they cannot touch you.

There will be that tremendous hour when you will be on your own and at that point you will need God more than you need any other person, more than any other being can come to your help. There is only God and if you spend your life in material acquisitions, if you are concerned mainly for the building up of your family and the acquiring of a good house and a good job and the maintaining of your health, let me tell you this, you are fooling yourself. There is one priority which should consume every person's mind.

There is one objective along which you must be moving to gain and that is the knowledge of God. Outside of God you are nothing. Without God you have no future.

Without God you have no personal identity. Settle for less than God and you are the biggest fool that ever there was. I say you need to experience God because God is so necessary in your life.

God is so necessary in your career. The hour will come, the hour to which every other hour is but a prelude when you face that great test of dying and in that tremendous hour you will need Him. To know you need God is a good thing to recognize now and to get alone with God is the basic requirement for Christian people.

You see we live in a world in evangelicalism where the big meeting syndrome sometimes captivates us. I'm not against the big meeting but it seems to me that the big meeting in the New Testament was exceptional and not normal. The experience of God is generally personal and not plural and to go on the circuit of the big meeting and to feel good just then may not necessarily be as far as you're concerned acquaintance with God.

You can transfer emotional feelings. You can transfer the feelings of feeling really good when you're in a crowd. I am moved at the last night of the proms.

I listen to it virtually every year. I would love to be there. I am moved by the singing of some of those old pieces that are brought out during the last night of the proms.

When we sing of the land of our fathers, when we sing Jerusalem then I get an experience which is almost parallel with a religious experience but I cannot say that that is knowing God. Knowing God is generally an experience I receive personally and not plurally. Now you might not like that teaching but I have the whole of scripture that I can bring to my witness to give account.

When did Jacob know God? When he was alone at Peneo. When did Moses have his first first theophany, his first experience of God? When he was in the backwoods of Midian and a bush started to blaze and it was not consumed. When did Daniel come to know God? As he was on the on the uh boundaries of of the river and God revealed himself through one of his emissaries from heaven and Daniel is brought face to face with the living God.

It is when Peter walks along the seashore of Galilee that the Christ comes and Peter falls at his feet and says depart from me for I'm a sinful man O Lord. It was the loneliness of that journey from Jerusalem to Damascus which was selected by God for Saul of Tarsus for Paul the apostle to be brought face to face with him and the ears of the others were unstopped and they did not see what he saw. It was on the isle of Patmos in his solitariness that John had an experience of the living God.

I repeat the point God mediates himself generally not always but generally at a personal rather than a plural level and for you to know God like that demands that you give him time. Professor Whitehouse a professor of the philosophy of religion I believe of the University of London some 30 odd years ago put down a definition of religion and he said religion is what a man does with his solitariness. I question that that's an adequate definition but within it there is a germinal thought there is a seed thought that is important.

It's when you are alone that you can test your knowledge of the God. He mediates knowledge of himself personally rather than plurally. The public is exceptional and not the normal.

So I ask you do you spend time with this God only to sit and think of God oh what a joy is this to think the thought to breathe the name earth has no higher bliss if I but knew thee as thou art oh loveliness unknown with what desire oh Lord my God would claim thee for its own. Do you ever spend half an hour in solitariness in the presence of the living God? Do you ever retire to your room or take your Bible out to the seashore or up on those downs and commune with the infinite God? Do you ever gaze and gaze into his face? Do you ever reflect upon his purposes? Do you ever have the vision of the cross in front of you and try to work out what it is that this God is trying to say? It is darkness to my intellect I cannot always grasp it but it's sunshine to my soul just to think and to think about him. Do not sell yourself short it is not the word of God that we are pursuing here in this church it is the God of the word.

You tell me there are infinitely variable experiences by which a man or a woman can encounter God and with that I will agree. Tell me of some experience in your life when God came upon you and smote you to the ground and then lifted you up and you went on a different level a different plane. Tell me there were times when you were praising God and you suddenly discovered a language that you'd not known before and that enabled you to bring the desires of your heart to God in a way that had been past your ability previously and that I will thank God for.

But tell me most of all that you know him, that you love him, that you have an intimate relationship with him that's getting deeper and deeper more wonderful as the days go by. I want to know him more. I close my ears to that which would hang me into this world to that which would anchor me to this life and to the objectives that most people are seeking after.

I don't want to listen to the cry of this world I want to see God in front of me and shout out life life and move along that course until ultimately I'm called from this land from this world to the next world. Let not a man boast in his wisdom. Let not a man boast in his riches.

Let not a man boast in the church attendance that he has or the community to which he affiliates as a Christian. Let a man boast only in this one thing that he knows me for the knowledge of God. It's the most important thing for you to seek after in this world and you miss that you miss everything.

You might be a priest at other levels but you're a pauper at this one. I beg of you again to seek after God and let the skeletal frame slumping over the pew be rejuvenated by the power of the spirit as God pours himself into you. George Whitfield was one for Christ by reading a book entitled the life of God in the soul of man and that's what I want to know more his life in my soul not knowledge about him but not but knowledge of him.

May that be mediated as you spend time alone in his company. Amen. 436 immortal love forever full forever flowing free 436 but warm sweet tender even yet a present help is he and faith has still its Olivet and love its Galilee.

Father God we slip our hands again in the nail pierced hand of your blessed son by the wings and constraints of his spirit we enjoy an intimacy which we ask might become even more profound. Deliver us from a barren evangelicalism that is all of the head and no experience of the heart. Deliver us from an emotionalism that's geared to the heart and has no anchorage within your word.

Balance us between word and spirit and spirit and word and enable us great God to go on and to know you more and more until that day dawns and the shadows flee away and our knowledge of you is complete as our soul takes leave of our body and we enter that celestial realm to be with you and the church of the firstborn and all the angelic community for eternity after eternity. So to this end during this sojourn on this earth we pray for your blessing the blessing of the triune God Father Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.