It's one thing to know about God, it's another to actually know God. Theology can be studied, but the Bible teaches us to not only understand about the Divine, but to know Him in a real and lasting way.

June 24, 2008

Knowing God…In a Personal Way

It’s called the Phoenix Lander, an unmanned probe that’s digging up dirt and analyzing it. And they’ve just found dirt with ice and ice means water and water could mean microscopic life might exist on Mars. Scientists are excited as the robot Phoenix keeps on digging and they keep on analyzing. Digging, that’s what we’re doing in the next few minutes, digging for truth. I’m Charles Morris and welcome to Haven Today where we’re telling the great story that’s all about Jesus. This is “Knowing God” week on Haven Today. The program today is called “Knowing God…In a Personal Way” and in just a few minutes we’ll be talking to Dr. J.I. Packer about his book “Knowing God”. Sandi Patty opens our program with a powerful song to “Make Me Glad.

Song: Make Me Glad
Performed by: Sandi Patty

This is Haven Today. I’m Charles Morris, “Knowing God…In a Personal Way” and that was Sandi Patty from her “Falling Forward” album “Make Me Glad”. “Knowing God” is a classic work. It’s changed the lives of countless believers. Over 3 million copies have been sold since it was first released in 1973. Knowing God, how do we go about doing that? I’ve had lots of classes on theology and I know it’s very possible to study God like NASA is studying Mars right now. You can analyze and categorize the attributes of God. You can get all kinds of knowledge about God. You could become an apologist, a teacher even a preacher, maybe even a great theologian and even with all that knowledge you might still only know God from a distance. You might never have set foot on the surface. Your knowledge might never have become something personal and relevant and life changing. You might know about the Lord but you might not know the Lord. There’s a tremendous danger in that kind of knowledge of God, an academic kind of knowledge. Let me read from the first chapter of “Knowing God”:

We need to ask ourselves, “What is my ultimate aim and what is my ultimate object in occupying my mind with these things? What do I intend to do with my knowledge about God?” If we pursue theological knowledge for its own sake, it’s bound to go bad on us.
Dr. J.I. Packer goes on describe what can happen:
Our knowledge of God will make us proud and conceited. For as the Apostle Paul told the conceited Corinthians, “Knowledge puffs up if anyone thinks he knows something he doesn’t yet know as he ought to know.”
But I must also add there is also a great danger in not studying God. The Bible gives us much information about God’s attributes. He’s immutable which means he doesn’t change. He’s omniscient which means he knows everything there is to know. He is sovereign which means he rules over everything and controls what happens over his creation. I could go on but here’s the point: the Bible never presents these as attributes like academic information. They’re always brought home to our lives as very relevant, life changing truths. The Lord doesn’t want us to know about him in an impersonal, academic way. He wants us to grow in our knowledge of him but he wants that knowledge to be very, very personal. He wants us to respond to who he is. The scriptures never give us an attribute of God as a generic fact. We’re not meant to just know about God. We’re meant to know God and to be deeply impacted by who the Bible reveals him to be. Let me give you an example. The Bible tells us that God is immutable and eternal. Now immutable is a big word but this just means that God doesn’t change and he also has no end. How does this help me? How do I make it personal even today? That’s what Psalm 102 is all about. The byline of the Psalm says it’s the prayer of an afflicted person when he is faint and pours out his lament before the Lord. Listen to some of the words from Psalm 102. Verse 3:
For my days vanish like smoke;

Verse 4:
My heart is withered like grass;

Verse 11:
My days are like the evening shadow.
Do you hear his craving for a permanence? “I’m mutable. I change. I’m smoke. I’m a shadow.” Everything changes whether we like it or not. Our circumstances change. Our moods change. Our ideas of God change and everything passes away. Nothing stays the same. Nothing lasts forever. Have you ever felt your mortality in this way? What do you do? Well, the Psalmist poured it all out to the Lord and he found his answer in the nature of his God. Everything changes except you O Lord.
Verse 12:
You O Lord, sit enthroned forever. Your renown endures through all generations.
Verse 25:
In the beginning you laid the foundations of the earth and the heavens are the work of your hands.
Verse 26:
They will perish but you remain. They will all wear out like a garment, like clothing you will change them and they will be discarded
Verse 27:
But you remain the same. Your years never end.
And then he ends his Psalm with a joyous declaration of what that means to him personally:
The children of your servants will live in your presence;
their descendants will be established before you.”
You see he realized that God’s immutability, never changing-ness and eternality were deeply relevant to his problem. They weren’t just boring intellectual truths for intellectuals. The Lord never changes which means his love for his people never changes. The Lord is eternal which means the lives of his people will be eternal. We are eternal because the Lord will cause us to live in his presence forever to be established before him for all eternity. Jesus put it like this. When the Sadducees were questioning whether there was going to be a resurrection he told them in Matthew 22:31 and 32 –
But about the resurrection of the dead—have you not read what God said to you, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.
A little meditation on the attributes of God can change our perspective in big ways when we make them personal, when we make them for ourselves. This goes for God’s justice as well as for his mercy, his love and his faithfulness. His sovereignty, his wisdom all his attributes, the very being of God is meant to shape our world view, to be the answer to our problems. But in order for that to happen we need to take the time to meditate. Last week I sat down for an afternoon with Dr. J.I. Packer and we talked about his own practice of Christian meditation.
Interview:
JP: The compelling reason, I believe is that in a love affair you’ve got to spend time with the object of your devotion in order to build a relationship that’s deep. One hears constantly of marriages coming to grief because he and she don’t take time simply to be with each other and to appreciate each other, and to go on doing that as the years pass. Well, I think it is the same with ourselves and the Lord Jesus and the Father. And meditation is very much a matter of focused appreciese (?) in the way that it is when he and she spend time telling each other what they think is right about each other. So I think that the discipline of meditation which is largely a lost art in our time, does urgently need to be rediscovered. There are different ways of doing it and I’ve written and I sometimes talk about the different ways. You can read a chunk of scripture and ask basic questions. What does this tell me about God? What does this tell me about life in the world? What does this tell me about my life today? And when I see the answer to those questions, well there’s matter for meditation straight away. Put yourself directly in the Lord’s presence and well, what you’re doing is “monologuing” to him or in his presence, should I say, about it. And meditation and prayer, where you address him directly, these slip into each other so easily that it’s sometimes hard to distinguish.
CM: And Christian meditation is different than Eastern mediation, right?
JP: Oh, gracious yes, because in Christian meditation you fill your mind with the revealed truth that comes from a loving God. With Eastern mediation you make your mind a blank as far as possible working with a meaningless mantra or whatever, thinking of one hand clapping or something of that sort. What you’re aiming to do in Eastern meditation first and foremost to get yourself altogether as distinct from being frazzled and pulled every which way by competing claims on your attention but when you’ve pulled yourself together, or when you’ve allowed yourself to come together in that way, the long term objective of Eastern meditation is to diminish your self-consciousness to vanishing point. So that you will not end up one who is more than a person at the moment, which is where the Christian is promised that he or she will end up in glory we shall be more personal than ever we manage to be down here, richer in every way as persons. But no in Eastern meditation the hope traditionally is, and I think that all the gurus still stay with it, that ultimately you will get to nirvana which is a condition in which you don’t have any self-consciousness to be pained and brought to grief. Unpleasant experiences will no longer be part of your life because you won’t be there to have them. You will have been absorbed to the great sea of being or something like that. Complete opposition there.
CM: It is. Back to the Christian side then. How do you yourself meditate and pray?
JP: Well for me meditation is most fruitful when I take a topic rather than a text. Of course I teach the substance of the topics that I take and so to think over the topic and tell the Lord from time to time, “This is wonderful. This I see as a reflection, an expression of your wisdom and your love and it’s marvelous.” That’s the kind of meditation that enriches me. I got the idea from a Puritan named Richard Baxter who wrote a book titled “The Saints Everlasting Rest”. It became a bestseller incidentally. Well, Baxter had already formed the habit and I may say that he was inclined to do this partly because he was a lifelong invalid and always thought he was living with one foot in the grave. The Lord has a sense of humor. Baxter lived till he was 76. No, but he thought he was living with one foot in the grave so he used to meditate on the subject of his book, on Heaven. And he spent half an hour every day brooding delightfully on the prospect of Heaven, the joys of Heaven, how much better Heaven would be than life down here and how marvelous was the Lord that was bringing him to Heaven having died to save him from Hell. Baxter commended this practice, that is a daily meditation on Heaven, until the end of his life. He maintained it in his own life and Baxter was just a wonderfully gifted, godly, fruitful Puritan. One of the classic. He is, I would say, torrential as a writer. Once he gets going on something well, it really is like a flood.
CM: Yes
JP: A flood coming at you fast, swamping you, overwhelming you.
CM: Thank you Jim Packer. Dr. J.I. Packer “Knowing God…In a Personal Way” here on Haven Today. When you meditate and pray do you feel like you’re doing all the talking? Learn to ask questions, to listen, to expect the Lord to speak to your heart. The reason we can know God is not just because he’s spoken to us in the Bible. The reason we can know God is that he’s actively engaged in the process. He’s in fellowship with us. He’s brought us into relationship with himself. He is there. This practice of meditation isn’t just a one way street. It’s a conversation. He is there. He’s given us his Spirit. He’s teaching us, counseling us, bringing his light into our minds as well as his love into our hearts. It’s not all about us getting the truth into our own hearts. It’s about us looking to him and receiving from him. It’s an awesome thing to realize that the Living God is attending to us personally but it’s also the truth. When we’re in the depths of despair we can cry out to the Lord and he will answer us. When we seek refuge in him he’s like a hen who raises his wings and draws us close and “clucks” reassuring words to our hearts. When we cry out for mercy he hears us and meets our needs, especially our need for understanding.

Song: You Are
Performed by: March Roach

The song is by Mark Roach and it is called “You Are” here on a “Knowing God” week on Haven Today. “Knowing God”, a book that’s been out since 1973 by Dr. J.I. Packer and we’re going to be hearing more from Dr. Jim Packer. If you missed our program yesterday where he tells his life story and also not only how he came to be a theologian but how he came to know the Lord, we have that available and you can go back to our homepage and look it up there at haventoday.org. We also have his bestselling book “Knowing God” and may I make a suggestion? Maybe you have a copy. I have a very old copy in my library. Why don’t you get a copy and read it yourself? Read it again if it’s been many years since you have. And what about getting a copy and giving it to a student you know? I was young in the faith when I first read “Knowing God” and I’ve gone back to it many, many times since then. It’s something that some people have compared to being the second most important book to the Bible. “Knowing God”, we have it here at Haven Today as a thank you for your gift this summer to the ministry. We’ve got it now and we’d like to get you a copy out right away. You can go to our webpage, haventoday.org, h.a.v.e.n.t.o.d.a.y, haventoday.org and you can read more about this valuable book called “Knowing God” by J.I. Packer. You can also call us if you’d like and here’s our telephone number, 1-800-654-2836, that’s 1-800-654-2836. Now Dr. Packer will be back on the program again with us tomorrow.
Let me just mention one other thing. They are still asking for tents in China and we are still sending them in the name of Jesus. We’ve connected with a Kingdom company in Kei Ping – that’s in southeastern China – that happens to make tents. And they’re making tents and they’re sending them to a Christian relief organization that’s operating in the southwest part of China, the Szechuan Province. And most of the tents that we’re sending are going to a mountain tribe way up in the mountains. They’ve been displaced by the earthquake. It happened several weeks ago now and the government is not sending any relief to them at all. Well, we’re going to and we’d like to ask for your help as well. Not a penny to Haven, whatever you want to send to help us send tents to China, we’ll pass that money on. Let me share with you a message we got from someone. It says, “Dear Haven Ministries, thank you so much for all that you do to touch the hearts of radio listeners. My son and I were touched to hear about the work that you’re doing to provide tents for the disaster victims in China. May God bless you and your ministry for caring so much for his flock. Please find enclosed funds for 2 tents. One of these has been paid for by my 16 year old son. I told him about your request and without hesitation he brought me $250 from his savings which is a lot considering he doesn’t have a job. This is savings from birthday gifts over the years. I pray that families in China will feel the presence of our Lord as they are blessed by these tents. God bless you, Adam and Blair.” Well, that had an impact on me and maybe it does on you as well. Would you like to help sponsor part of a tent, all of a tent or, like Adam and Blair did, 2 tents? Just get in touch with us. You’ll see it there on our homepage, haventoday.org or 1-800-65-HAVEN. Just make sure when you get in touch with us by calling or by sending a gift over the internet how much of your gift you want to go for tents or how much you want of your gift to go to help us this summer here at Haven Today.
Well, thank you so much for being with me. Would you come back again tomorrow? It’s still “Knowing God” week and tomorrow we’ll be back as we share this great story together. It’s all about Jesus here on Haven Today.