I’ve been doing it wrong! Prayer, I mean. I’ve been asking God for help, trying to listen to him, I learned the A.C.T.S. acronym for prayer (adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication), but one thing it leaves out is seeking to know God. I wasn’t spending time in prayer seeking to know God better, and I have come to believe that that is a crucial focus in life.
“Know him in all your paths, and he will keep your ways straight.” (Prov. 3:6, Common English Bible translation)
Most translations read “In all your ways acknowledge him”, but that’s a weak word in English, a hat tip to God all along the way? It won’t do, and the usual meaning of the word yada in Hebrew is to know. I think it makes perfect sense here, and speaks of something I’ve been missing.
I think the best starting point in the Christian life is to seek to know God better, you can’t trust someone you don’t know, for instance, since faith is based on evidence, as John Lennox insists. So the way to have more faith is to know God better! Not to try to have faith, as I heard one Christian-turned-atheist say, when he said he tried and tried to have faith, and that didn’t work. I read a lot of apologetics, trying to increase my faith, and though apologetics helped me see some things more clearly, my faith wasn’t increasing like I had hoped. “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17), so I was faithfully reading my Bible, but my faith wasn’t increasing. But now I’m reading my Bible in order to know God better, not trying to get answers to my questions so much. When I listen to God in prayer, I’m listening to hear from him in order to know him better. Before, I would just writhe and get distracted, now I have a purpose, now I can be still and focus on the Lord.
“We must know, before we can love”, said Brother Lawrence, and this is similar to increasing faith, to love God more, we should try to know him better. The starting point is knowing God, not trying to love God, “by force of resolution we cannot love” (Charles Finney). “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19), and though God was working in my life, giving me grace and insight, and even healing, I somehow wasn’t receiving that as God’s love. I had a distorted view of God, and had doubts from time to time about God’s goodness. To get that corrected, I needed to know God.
Then there is the area of obedience, again, you can’t submit to someone you don’t know! I sang “I surrender all” and similar songs in church again and again, and thought I had surrendered, only to discover afterwards that it was a mental gymnastic, that I hadn’t actually done this after all. So the remedy is to know God better, the more we know him, the more we will trust him, the more we will love him, and then the more we will obey him.
“If anyone loves me, he will keep my word” (John 14:23)
So to submit to God, we need to love him more, and to love him more, we need to know him better.
“And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” (John 17:3)
And on the last day, Jesus won’t say to those who did not follow him, “you didn’t pray a prayer of repentance and faith”, he won’t even say “you didn’t believe”, instead he will say “I never knew you” (Mt. 7:23).
And the Bible says “he who loves God is known by God” (1 Cor. 8:3) So for God to know us, we have to love God, and again, to love God more, we need to know him better.
So I do hold that the source of what we need, the starting point of faith, and love and obedience, of all the Christian life, is to know God better and better.
“His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence…” (2 Peter 1:3)