In all of us there is a deep longing, a quiet desire to know God. It is Dr. J.I. Packer, in his bestselling book Knowing God, who points us to not only the holiness of God, but the intimacy we can have with God through Jesus Christ.

June 27, 2008

Knowing God…As the Light of the World

Beyond what’s happening in your life, beyond what’s happening in the world, the typhoon and ferry sinking in the Philippines claiming so many lives, beyond the flooding aftermath in the Midwest United States, beyond the killings that continue in Zimbabwe, beyond the lightning fed fires in California and beyond just the heat of summer in North America there is something that goes beyond, something that all of us need. It’s something so deep we don’t even always think about it. I’m talking about knowing God. I’m Charles Morris and welcome to Haven Today, telling the great story that’s all about Jesus on a program called “Knowing God…As the Light of the World”. It is through the Son, Jesus Christ that we can know the Father. In the next few minutes we’ll be joined by Dr. J.I. Packer, author of the bestselling book “Knowing God” and later I’ll tell you how to get a copy of this classic Christian book and help us get through the leanness of summer here at Haven Ministries. Consider now, this Light of the World. Forget your schedule, your busy life and join me in worshipping the Lord.

Song:
Performed by: Watermark

From the “Farewell” album by Watermark and featuring Christy Knockles that’s “Light of the World” here on a Haven Today with Dr. J.I. Packer called “Knowing God…As the Light of the World”. Next to the Bible there are many Christians who think this book “Knowing God” is probably the most important work they’ve ever read. It was first released in 1973 and one person I know in ministry reads it through every 5 years. I first read it as a young man in my 20s and have referred to it many times since. It was the first book outside of the Bible that my son Peter read after becoming a Christian. I was speaking a few days ago with a young pastor in Eugene, Oregon. This pastor had first read the book as a young teenager and I asked Richard Roberts to tell us what was important about the book to him. Richard, what impact do you see this book having on others and in your own ministry?
RR: I think that the biggest thing that impacted me was just the fact that Dr. Packer points us so clearly to who God is and as a young man it’s so easy to look at yourself as the most important thing and to really make God into my own image in the sense of he was who I wanted to be and then I would compare myself to others. What I loved about “Knowing God” is it gives you a clear, biblical picture of who God is and then there’s always a challenge at the end of every chapter. What are you going to do with this knowledge? How is this going to affect how you view God, how you view yourself and how you view others around you? So it doesn’t pull any punches, it gets right down there into the nitty-gritty. I need that all the time because my eyes turn inward so even rereading it over and over again always drawing my attention and the eyes of my heart back on to who God truly is and what he calls us to respond to in light of that revelation of himself is very helpful.
CM: As a pastor Richard, how do you see this book impacting and affecting others as well?
RR: I think in the same way. I think as a pastor I’m always looking for anything that will turn our eyes to Jesus and will reveal who God truly is. I think in our society especially today with its propensity to want to make God into its own image, to take certain parts of him as good and reject other parts of him, “Knowing God” puts all of God’s revelation out in there and says this is who he is and how are you going to respond to who he says he is? Anything that calls our attention to who he truly is, is beneficial. Like it did with me, how I’ve seen it work in other people’s lives is that it really leads us to worship God for who he is. There’s always that call to worship him in his majesty and his immensity and the greatness of his love in the glory of the Gospel, all that is calling us forth just in simple revelation. That’s all it really is, all, it’s just proclamation of who he is and what he’s done and that in itself is what moves us to worship so that’s what I expect it to do, I guess, when we use it in our teaching classes. And that’s what we’ve seen even in opening up discussion as how God has revealed himself challenges our preconceptions of who God should be. It’s been helpful in that light.
CM: Reverend Richard Roberts, pastor of Emerald Bible Fellowship in Eugene, Oregon. And that young pastor, who’s also the son of a pastor just happens to be my son-in-law and if I sound a little bit proud, well, you’re hearing me right. Last week I spent the afternoon with Dr. J.I. Packer in his office at Regent College in Vancouver. I asked him if he had to do it over is there anything he would change or add to this famous book that he wrote, “Knowing God”.
JP: I might write an extra chapter on the holiness of God, not because the thoughts I have on God’s holiness aren’t deployed throughout the book. They are, but because God’s holiness is so important and the theme is so much neglected in evangelical teaching these days that I want to highlight it and toot a horn about it and make a song and dance about it and do everything that I can to make people face it.
Cm: Wow
JP: God is Holy! That means he’s different. That means he’s transcendent and that means that he is pure in a way that we are not pure. So if we acknowledge God as he is we have a problem and that’s my lead into the Gospel these days.
CM: Dr. J.I. Packer on what he would do differently if he were writing “Knowing God” today and not back in the 70s. What is the Gospel? Do you know the good news? Do you know what you have as a believer in Jesus? Do you know what he’s done? The foundation, the heart of it is a sacrifice by Jesus Christ, an atonement. Romans 3:23-25 –
For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood—
So God presented Jesus as a sacrifice of atonement, the scripture says. His blood took our sins away. That’s the heart, that’s the foundation of the good news. But the highest privilege we have as believers is adoption. We have been adopted by a Living God. We’ve been brought into the most intimate, most loving, a most privileged relationship with him. Dr. Packer makes the point that our joy in this privilege grows as we grow in our knowledge of God. If you just read the New Testament without reading the Old Testament you miss the wonder of the relationship we have with God through Christ. But if you soak yourself in the law and the prophets, if you begin to grasp the holiness of God, the “otherness” of God, the unapproachable greatness of God and then you read the New Testament, you can hardly believe this good news. We can call the Awesome God “Abba” or Papa, Father. We’re his sons and daughters. We can approach him with boldness and intimacy and live in his love. He loves us as he loves Jesus and he delights in us, his children. Grasping those two facts together, God’s holiness and the intimateness we have with him, that’s when we reach the very heights of joy. 1 John 3:3 –
How great is the love the Father has lavished on us that we should be called children of God. And that’s what we are! The reason the world doesn’t know us is that it didn’t know him. Dear friends, now we are children of God and what we will be has not yet been made known but we know that when he appears we shall be like him for we shall see him as he is. Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself just as he is pure.
Dr. J.I. Packer is not just a great theologian. He’s a delightful man. Let’s listen in on part of the conversation with him. I mentioned what we say about ourselves every day, how we tell the great story here at Haven Today. It’s all about Jesus and he agreed.
JP: It is all about Jesus in the Trinitarian sense which I spend a whole chapter defining
Cm: A chapter, yes.
JP: Jesus is the Son of the Father doing the will of the Father. Jesus with the Father sends the Holy Spirit to lead us into the life of fellowship with both the Father and the Son. It’s Jesus in a Trinitarian context all the way through. I think it was meant to be. And if it doesn’t come across that way well, then I’ve written the book wrong. It’s Jesus in a Trinitarian frame.
CM: What is the good news and what has God done through Christ and how has it made God known to us? Good news!
JP: The Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the world. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whoever believes in him should have eternal life.” That’s the very essence of the Gospel. God loves, that’s God the Father. God sends, this is Jesus Christ the Savior. God sends Jesus to the cross where he becomes the substitute for us, bearing the penalty for our sins. That’s the old and true way of understanding the cross. There are other aspects of it but this is the fundamental one. God raised his son from the dead so that he might become the Living Savior of all those who trust him, that’s faith, and accept him and serve him as their Lord and so live the new life under Christ, in Christ, through Christ, for Christ, all their days.
CM: In the very last chapter of the last section of “Knowing God” you have a chapter called “The Adequacy of God”. What do you mean by that and how does understanding the adequacy of God help us to go the whole way in the Christian life? That’s how you put it, I believe.
JP: Well, the idea which my word adequacy is trying to cover in that chapter is the thought that God is sufficient to keep you going and give you joy and make you realize that you are spiritually on top in every situation even if physically you are very much under the harrow. God never lets you down. Jesus never lets you down. If therefore you have God the Father and the Son and the indwelling Spirit, you are rich whatever else you haven’t got. And I spend some time in that chapter expounding Romans 8 to try and show that in Romans 8 that is what we’re being told in detail with specific reference to our persons being justified and accepted and we’re adopted into God’s family and we have the Holy Spirit in us giving us hope and energizing us to live for God’s glory and we rejoice all the time even when we are conscious that our prayers are weak. We rejoice in the fact that the Holy Spirit prays for us and our relationship with God stands steady. What then shall we say to these things? This is a peroration to which Paul works up at the end of Romans 8, “if God is for us who can be against us?” Answer: nobody that counts. And that’s of course what kept the martyrs going in the early Christian centuries. That’s what still keeps martyrs going in Islamic countries where folk are still put to death, how shall I say it, sometimes judicially and sometimes informally,
CM: Yes
JP: for abandoning Islam and becoming Christians. That still happens, alas but if God is for us who is against us? And Paul goes on and he ends up saying that nothing in creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. That’s his last word in the chapter and that’s pretty much my last word in my last chapter of “Knowing God” and that’s the best news in the world for anybody it seems to me! That’s what I want my reader to go away with.
CM: And I think that’s what I’d like our listeners to go away with as well. Thank you, Dr. Packer for joining us on Haven Today.
JP: I’m glad to have done it.
CM: Could I ask you to pray?
JP: Surely.
Cm: OK. Please lead us in prayer.
JP: Almighty Father through Jesus Christ our Lord and our Savior, your Son, our Master, we come to you. In the power of the Holy Spirit we open our hearts to you. We cry to you Heavenly Father, that you will constantly make vivid to us all the precious truths about your grace, your goodness, your love, your mercy and your power which the apostles taught, which Jesus himself proclaimed, which the scriptures are full of and which I myself have tried to write about in book after book. Show us, Father as only you can through spiritual enlightenment how glorious you are as the lover of our souls, how glorious the Lord Jesus is as the Savior of our souls, how glorious the Holy Spirit is as the one who sustains our souls in fellowship with the Father and the Son. In these days Father, when superficiality abounds and threatens on every side, even in relation to life’s important things, in this age when there’s so much shallowness and so little attention, sustained attention to the things that matter, teach us we pray, to dwell deep in the knowledge of this precious truth of your saving love and power, teach us to dwell deep through learning to meditate on it, learning to brood on it, to keep it on our mind morning noon and night and never to forget that we sinners who trust Jesus as our Savior, we are the beloved children of our God. We are the most privileged people in the world. We are the most wonderfully blessed. We are most gloriously enriched, and not just for this life but for all eternity also. Oh teach us these things Father and so may we grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ, for his name’s sake, amen.

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“Knowing God…As the Light of the World” here on a Haven Today with Dr. J.I. Packer. Thank you so much for joining me and Dr. Packer as we’ve talked about a number of issues that, as he pointed us to the scriptures and what the scriptures teach on how we can know God through Jesus Christ in a Trinitarian way, as Dr. Packer told us a few minutes ago. Well, if you have never read the book “Knowing God” or maybe it’s been a long time since you have or maybe you know someone who needs to read the book “Knowing God” this classic book is available for you as our thank you for your gift to Haven Today. Let me give you our internet location. We’re haventoday.org, that’s h.a.v.e.n.t.o.d.a.y, haventoday.org. There you can read more about the book “Knowing God”. You can also call us if you’d like to and here’s our toll free number in North America, 1-800-654-2836, that’s 1-800-654-2836. When you do get in touch with us by either going to haventoday.org or by calling 1-800-65-HAVEN, be sure and let us know the station you’re listening to. And if sometimes you miss the program on your local Christian station you can listen to us online and in fact you might even want to share the program with a friend of yours, that’s easy enough to do. Just go to the website, push the little button on our homepage that says “Listen” and then you can not only listen again but it’s easily explained how you can then send the program on to a friend for listening.
I’m Charles Morris and I want to thank you for joining me along with J.I. Packer. Would you come back again next time when again well be telling the great story? It’s all about Jesus and we’ll do it together here on Haven Today.