Great Themes No.5 Knowing God

Just two or three verses. The 23rd verse is the point at which I commence. If you've got an NIV, it's page 887.

If you haven't, you're on your own. This is what the Lord says. It's verse 23.

This is what the Lord says. 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 who exercises kindness, justice, and righteousness on earth. For in these I delight, declares the Lord.

Now Philippians and chapter 3. And again in the NIV, it's page 248. The New Testament section, obviously. Verse 7, Philippians 3. Paul giving his testimony.

Whatever was to my profit, I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith.

I want to know Christ, the power of his resurrection, the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so somehow to attain to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it, but one thing I do, forgetting what is behind and straining towards what is ahead, I press on towards the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenwards in Christ Jesus.

Amen. ... himself, and being obedient to death, even death on a cross. For Jesus, my Lord.

His were the planets and stars in the sky. His were the valleys and mountains so high. His were the riches from pole unto pole.

But he became poor to ransom my soul. They borrowed a colt, lowly beast for a king. Jesus, my Savior.

No court brought him honor, no caroling's ring. For Jesus, my Lord. His were the planets and stars in the sky.

His were the valleys and mountains so high. His were the riches from pole unto pole. But he became poor to ransom my soul.

He borrowed a room for the Passover feast. Jesus, my Savior. Becoming both servant and heavenly priest, this Jesus, my Lord.

His were the planets and stars in the sky. His were the valleys and mountains so high. His were the riches from pole unto pole.

But he became poor to ransom my soul. He borrowed a tomb for the crucified one. Jesus, my Savior.

No monument royal for God's only Son. For Jesus, my Lord. His were the planets and stars in the sky.

His were the valleys and mountains so high. His were the riches from pole unto pole. But he became poor to ransom my soul.

But he became poor to ransom my soul. I decided this afternoon that I would change to some degree what I was going to preach on this evening. And I would like to speak to you on the related topic of knowing God.

Knowing God. I had in mind to put an accent specifically on the gospel, as is my normal practice here on a Sunday evening. But then I thought that the brave and valiant souls that negotiated such bad weather must already be committed to the cause of the gospel of Christ.

So what I want to do in a informal way, and perhaps using more personal illustration than is my general custom, is to gather some remarks and share them with you on this great, great topic of knowing God. Listen to these words that I've been staring at for the last few minutes in introducing my theme. Let him who boasts, says Jeremiah in his ninth chapter, let him who boasts boast about this, that he understands and knows me.

You could take away, I believe I can say this without being priggish or engaging in false modesty. You could take away most things in my life, my home, my books. You could strip me of virtually everything, including perhaps my friends.

And still I would want to continue to live. I think it's possible to still enjoy oneself with many of the props that we take for granted removed. I've known what it's been in earlier years in my life to know want in some degree, and albeit for relatively short periods, cushioned by the fact of soon returning to the UK, I've known what it's been to endure hardship in third world countries.

And bearing in mind these two aspects of my own experience in former years and in more recent times, I think I can again reiterate the fact that you could strip most things from me, and I'd still want to live. But take away from me my faith in God, and then for me this world becomes a horrible place. And despite the closest of friendships on the human level that I might have known, or even in a time of projected crisis might still know, life to me would be utterly distasteful.

There is only one thing basic to everything else that I have and indeed enjoy that has such importance that cut it away from me, and I see no rhyme, no reason in living. My knowledge of God. I can tell you that in my fourth decade, my experience of God means more to me now than it has ever meant in my life.

I'm more convinced of the truth of the Christian faith and that knowledge of God is the most important thing to ascertain than I ever have been. A. W. Tozer, whose works are almost in my bloodstream, has a volume entitled The Pursuit of God. It takes a lifetime to know God.

I'm not a very good student. I don't suppose in this academy I've got much beyond the kindergarten stage, but what I have discovered of God I enjoy to the extent that without it life to me would be utterly and completely unacceptable. Now having said that, let me make a distinction, because I think that there are some people here who perhaps might be misunderstanding me.

I'm not talking about the knowledge I have about God, the knowledge that one gleans from pure Bible study and the reading of devotional books. I'm talking about intimate, naked knowledge of God. I use an illustration.

There's a brother I know and love dearly out in South India. He's 28 years of age. He's got the typical dark hair of Indian folk and brown eyes.

He's about as tall as I am, but he's slimmer. He used to be a magician, and I mean by that he involved himself in witchcraft. He's now out of that, and he belongs to the Lord Jesus.

He's a successful evangelist. He's won hundreds to Christ. I've lived with him.

I've woken up early in the morning, sometimes at the hour of five o'clock, believing that perhaps I might have the opportunity of praying before he did, and I've discovered that at every occasion he'd be in the typical Indian posture, doubled up, prostrate before the living God. A remarkable man, whose name, as I say, is Chela Durai. I could go on and feed you with more information.

I could tell you everything I know. I could exhaust you of every detail that's in my mind about that man, and having done that, there would be this great distinction between you and me. You would know about him.

I only would know him, because you can't know someone intimately by proxy, and you can't know God by proxy. You can't even know God just by reading the Bible. You can't know God simply because your mother knows God, or your father knows God, or your children know God.

You can only know God in the way that Jeremiah boasts about, personally, intimately, directly, dynamically. You might be a young person this evening, and I want to tell you this, and it's the most important truth that I could ever teach you, that the greatest pursuit in your life must be to know God for yourself, so that if your parent wasn't alongside you, assuming he, she is Christian, so that if you were taken out from the tabernacle, so that if you were stripped of any possibility of Christian friendship, you would nonetheless be able to hold on to the fact that you know God for yourself. I've been reading one of the most interesting books I've ever come across.

Someone tells me every book that I make mention of is always the most interesting. Well, they just improve as I get hold of them and read them. It's written by the minister of Peking Tabernacle.

Did you know they had a tabernacle in Peking? You might think that the minister of the tabernacle here is somewhat Chinese. Well, this man is really Chinese. Pastor Wang Mingdao, and he for some 25 years was in prison.

He had no use of a bible because that had been taken away from himself. He had no experience of any other Christian person, and yet when he was released in January 1980, he sang as his testimony to the way that God had been with him in his cell, all the way my Savior leads me, what have I to fear beside? You see, he knew God. Every prop had been taken.

His wife removed from him. The deacons, the elders, or whatever officials they have in Peking Tabernacle never saw them. The bible, they stripped it from him, and yet for 25 years Pastor Mingdao clung to his faith in the living God, and that's the sort of faith that I want to encourage everybody here in the tabernacle to pursue for themselves.

What is required to know God? Now bear in mind I'm speaking to Christian people. I'm not preaching the gospel this evening. I'm making this assumption, which may or may not be correct, that everybody downstairs here in our sanctuary is a Christian.

So I am taking for granted the fact that you've said to the Lord Jesus, come into my heart, and that you are in a faith relationship with God on the basis that you're converted. But you see, as A. W. Tozer tells us in one of his many books, one of the mistakes of Christian people is that having found God, they stop searching. Having found God, they stop searching.

Well you say it seems reasonable if you've found something to stop looking for it. Well on the human level that's right. If I lose my watch and then I find it, I stop looking, unless I'm a little deranged.

But you see we're not talking about a watch, we're not talking about an animate thing, we're talking about God. And when you've found him, you're just at the beginning of a discovery that's going to last a lifetime, and it won't be exhausted. I remember listening to George Beverly Shea singing some years ago about the love of God, and if I remember the words, it's all right Alan, I'm not going to sing it.

If I remember the words, he said this, we can only see a little of the ocean as we stand on the sandy shore, but out there beyond the eye's horizon there's more. We can only see a little of God's loving, a few rich treasures from his mighty store, but out there beyond the eye's horizon there's more, there's more. There's so much of God to know that to stop searching, having encountered his salvation, is to make a tragic mistake shared alas by 10,000 evangelical Christians.

Wouldn't you think, being my age, you see the gray hairs and the fact that I'm withering, wouldn't you think that having read the Bible I don't know how many times, having gone through some of it in the original language, wouldn't you think that I'd be sick to death of the thing? Let me put it bluntly, I mean would you read Agatha Christie over and over and over and over again? Of course you wouldn't. You might enjoy a novel once, twice perhaps if it really attracted you, but you wouldn't read it again and again and again. Why do I read this? Because you see, through this book I know more and more about God, and I can never exhaust what the book has to say, and I could never exhaust my experience of God.

How do you know God? What's required for you as a young person or for older friends? Thank God for some of our senior friends who managed to get here this evening. What's required of you if you really want to know God deeply? The first thing is this, you've got to give Him time. Do you know why most marriages break? Because folk who were once in love stop giving time to each other, and they take one another for granted, and as a result it dies, because a marriage won't last forever unless you work at it, and working at it means giving time to the one to whom you're married, and it's the same with God.

Just rushing into the tab on a Sunday evening or a Sunday morning is not sufficient. We live in a world that's full of haste. Someone's defined life in time in terms of hurry, worry, and bury, and many people's life is just like that.

That's why we grow so many ulcers, but God's got time on His side, and God in no way has allowed Himself to become conformed, as Tozer says, to the way that we live our lives in all its rush. God has not bowed to our nervous haste, nor embraced the methods of our machine age. It is well that we accept the hard truth now.

The man who would know God must give Him time. He must count no time wasted which is spent in the cultivation of His acquaintance. He must give Himself to meditation and prayer, hours on end.

We live in an age when everything is instant. You can have instant soup, you can have instant potatoes, but you can't have an instant religious experience. You can go to some places and they might suggest to you, though possibly you misunderstood the preacher, that this was the case.

You might sense exhilaration when you're gathered together in some convention meeting. You might have a tingling feeling that runs up and down your spine, but unless you have known on your own, day after day and week after week, a naked encounter of God, then what you've settled for is a package deal which is actually cosmetic. There's no value in it really.

You can can music, but you can't can God. God is available to us to know more and more as your wife is, or your close friend is, if you will give time to cultivating that relationship. And Christians are at the low level of spirituality that most of us find ourselves at because we refuse to give the time that God demands.

We taste thee, O thou living bread, says the hymn writer, and long to feast upon thee still. We drink of thee the fountainhead and thirst our souls from thee to fill. Do you have that real experience, that real hunger for God? Moses went for many a long walk with God toward the desert in Egypt before eventually he went into Midian and had an experience of God in the bush that burned but was not consumed.

Daniel spent months in the presence of God before Gabriel was sent from heaven to reveal to Daniel the secrets of the centuries yet to dawn. Nehemiah was three months in Shushan's court in the presence of God before he went to Jerusalem to rebuild the walls and to do a work successfully for the Lord. When will we learn in the 20th century that the man, the woman, who will be successful in God's service, who will know God, must, must, must give him time? There is no package deal.

There is no instant knowledge of God. There is instantaneous conversion. Then the knowledge of God is a progressive experience from that moment onward.

To know God requires time. To know God also requires a concern for truth, truth. Jesus said, you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.

And he said later on, my word is truth. I said I'd be a little personal this evening. When I had become engaged, the lady who I was to marry had to go back to South Africa.

And for some six months or so we were apart. I can still remember the experience the hollowness I felt as I watched that ship sailing out from Southampton docks, setting off on its voyage to Cape Town. Of course, we weren't out of contact for six months because letters were possible and the GPO did a roaring trade.

And when letters came the other way, they were absorbed. They were read and re-read and re-re-read. In fact, some of them, and it's not an exaggeration, I almost knew off by heart.

You see, they were my letters. My future wife was speaking to me. This is God's letter.

In the New Testament, have you ever noticed this? When the New Testament writers, particularly the author of the Hebrew epistle, quotes from the Old Testament, he doesn't say God said, he says God says. In the authorised version we sometimes get all those complicated verbal endings mixed up, a perfect and a past perfect and so on and so forth. And sometimes you have to jump to a modern translation to realise the impact that when the New Testament writers quote the Old Testament writers, they quote in terms of God still speaking.

This is not a historic book that's to be locked away with the accounts of Josephus' history of the Jews. This is a remarkable book. It's constantly up to date or has been quipped.

Generally speaking, God is always generally speaking. He speaks through His Word. How do I know God? By giving Him time and by applying a great deal of time to this book and absorbing this book and its contents as though it was God writing directly to me.

I believe that. I believe that God's choicest way of speaking to me is through this book. And to this very day, I carry a little book around, a little notebook, and when I read the Bible and something hits me and I believe God is speaking to me, I write down that verse.

I asked the Lord some months ago just to give me one or two starting points of addresses from the Gospel of John so that I could share it with folks in the tab in the months to come. And I found that God was speaking to me through so many verses that if I were to preach on all of them, I'd have to live a mighty long time just to exhaust John's Gospel. And I'm not exaggerating.

The man who would know God is a man who must give Him time and a man who has a concern for truth. There's something else about a man who would know God, and this perhaps might surprise you. He's a man who will sometimes produce tears.

He will sometimes weep. Again, I quote Tozer, the Bible was written in tears, and to tears it will reveal its best treasures. When the prophets wrote the books that bear their names, sometimes they wrote from an emotion that spilled over to the effect that tears were seen by those who watched.

The psalmist says, my tears have been my meat both day and night. Paul, when he writes to the Philippians, a letter of joy refers to those who are opponents of the Gospel of Christ, and he says, I do so with tears. God tells us, and the comment is perhaps extraordinary in the book of Psalms, that He has a bottle, and He collects the tears of men and women who are broken-hearted for the salvation and for the affairs of other people.

I don't believe that you can always read the Bible and never be moved. I don't believe that you can look out and see the state of this world and the state of some people that perhaps are related to you through ties of blood and not weep. Whenever did you learn that prayer is just speaking? Is love always conveyed through words? I can very often tell you what my wife is thinking by just looking at her, especially if I'm going on a bit long in an address.

You can communicate in no end of ways, and very often it's through the investment of tears, those liquid diamonds, that God will pay His best dividend as He will make Himself known to a man, to a woman who is sometimes broken-hearted, as a result of the state of the world or of their personal family circumstances. The men and women who knew God in Bible times and down the years were men who sometimes expressed themselves emotionally. The man who would know God, he must give him time.

He must be a man who's concerned for truth. He will be a man who sometimes will allow the emotions of his own heart to be registered by the tears that flow. And then, and with this point I'll conclude, he's a man who has absolute trust in God.

He believes that God will speak. He believes that God is the eternal now. He believes that it's as, it's as wonderful to be alive in the 20th century as what it was in the first century.

There are some people who think, if only I had lived when Peter lived, when Paul lived, when Jesus was on earth, if only I had lived at the time of the patriarchs, when Abraham was around and Jacob was around, why is it that I have to live in the 20th century? God doesn't speak in the 20th century. It was so more wonderful in those days. Don't you know that God is outside of our concept of time? To him a thousand years is but a day that is past.

God is the God of the eternal now. He can be as real to you as he was to Abraham. As real to me as Jesus was to Peter.

I'm not exaggerating. I believe that with the depths of my heart, that I can know God at that level, that he can speak to me if I have utter confidence and trust in his word. Jesus said, my sheep hear my voice.

He wouldn't have said that if he didn't speak. How can you hear if the man is dead, if the man is dumb, if the man's got nothing else to say, and by the man I'm referring to the God-man, even Jesus. No, my friend, he speaks.

He speaks today to those who trust him. I once came across a little expression. It was in a book by a man called Ravenhill, and it referred to certain people, great men of God like Augustine and and Calvin, Luther, Spurgeon, and many another.

And Ravenhill said this, he described them as being of the aristocracy of the spirit. These were men, these were women, for he quotes ladies too, who were in a choice relationship with God that other people didn't know. And yet Ravenhill went on to say that the aristocracy of the spirit is open to everyone, who will give God time, who will be concerned to deepen their relationship.

I've been reading during the last two days about some people called the desert fathers. In effect, they were monks, and they were so concerned about deepening their knowledge of God that they went off and formed communities in the desert. I'm not suggesting we do the same, but I am impressed by the reasons that caused some men to do this.

In the world of their day, people were saying, how can I get more? The desert fathers were saying, what can I do without? Their world was asking, how can I find myself? They were asking, how can I lose myself? They were saying, how can I win friends and influence people? But the desert fathers were saying, how can I know God? They used to be called the athleti dei, the athletes of God. They stripped themselves off from anything that might imprison them and hold back their spiritual development. Oh, there were extremes in the monastic movement, but some of the men that the monasteries produced, if you dare, and you're not too biased against Catholicism, to read what they had to say, indicates that they had such a choice and deep and profound experience of the living God.

I believe that that's possible for us today. Not to go off into the desert, not to become a hermit on Cisbury Ring, but by giving God time, by giving attention to truth, by emotionally sometimes expressing our concern in tears, by always exhibiting an utter trust, we can deepen our knowledge of God and agree with Jeremiah, in this will I boast that I know God. May your knowledge of Him be made that much more deep as a result of these thoughts that I shared with you.

Amen. Amen. Now, Father, help us, not only during the singing of our hymns, but in the week that is to be, to reflect upon the name of Jesus.

Help us to appreciate that wherever we are, whatever we're doing, He's alongside, and His can be a felt presence and a heard voice. Lord, enable us to give time, enable us to give trust, enable us where necessary to give tears, and to cultivate above all things our relationship with You. Oh God, our desire is that of Paul, that I might know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and be made conformable to His suffering, whatever the cost.

Enable us, blessed God, to know You more. Amen.