sketches from life

First, let us start off with a cool picture for the day:











Ok, maybe two pictures. I couldn't decide which one was cooler. They work better together than apart. These  were taken by Clark Little. Bravo, sir. Very cool!



















Ok, now on to the item of the day.
My roommate and I were talking the other day, and the conversation turned towards the way people think about "knowing" God. You see, for a lot of people, and even for a lot of Christians, knowing God just means that they know who He is. They know some of the stories about Him, they've gone to church, they've listened to preachers and other people talk about Him. But despite all the head knowledge they may have of Him, they don't really know who He is.

This is the difference between knowing about someone, and actually knowing them.

Think about it this way: Say you have a favorite celebrity, and you know all sorts of things about them. You can know their name, the names of their family members, what their favorite foods are, and where they live. You can know their likes and dislikes, their pet projects, and what they stand for. You may even claim to love this person, respect and esteem them. But if you've never spent time with this person, no relationship exists there. In all likelihood, they don't even know you exist. You can't truly know someone until you've invested time in building a relationship with that person. It doesn't matter how much head knowledge you have. Until you have built heart knowledge about that person, you don't really know them.

It works similarly with God. Many Christians today only know him through what they hear about from others. They get their weekly dose of God and Christianity on Sunday morning, and the rest of the week they just coast through and do their own thing. They say they love Him. They believe He's there. They may even try to adjust their behavior to suit what they think He wants. But what kind of relationship is that? There's no communication, no expenditure of effort, no heart knowledge. You can't know God by spending an hour once a week listening to someone else tell you about how they know Him.

What God wants from us is not a charade of obedience over an indifferent, distant heart. He wants to know you. To really know you. He already knows everything about you. He created you. The Bible says He knitted you together in your mothers womb and knows the number of hairs on your head. But that's not enough. He wants relationship with you, and He wants it enough to have sent Jesus to die a horrible death to allow that relationship to exist.

And yet, rather than embrace that opportunity for the prize, the treasure that it is, we let it pass us by. We're content just to squeeze all of God into a Sunday morning sermon (if even that) and go on without Him the rest of the week. But that doesn't even begin to encompass what it means to know God.

To know God, you must die to yourself. You have to spend time with Him. Read the Word for yourself and talk to Him through prayer constantly. How else is a relationship supposed to grow? Just as with earthly relationships, if you don't spend time with someone, the relationship atrophies. If you only speak to Him on rare occasions, of course it will feel awkward when you do. But it's not meant to be that way. When you spend the time to get to know someone well, you become more comfortable with them. The same is true with God. The more time you spend with Him, the easier it becomes to talk to Him and to hear His voice. And only then will you truly begin to know God.

So don't settle for just knowing about God. Take advantage of the sacrifice He made so that we can truly know Him.