Experiencing God

It is possible to respond to culture’s overemphasis on the love of God at the expense of his other attributes by diminishing his love and promoting his other attributes. Maybe this was the tendency of my own heart. To see billboards that say God loves you and instinctively respond “Yes but he’s holy!” Over time, potentially this is just personal and unique to me, but overtime, you can begin to confess his love, confirm his love, sing about his love, but lose sight of its TASTE in your heart.

It is also possible to respond to church culture’s overemphasis and abuse of experience at the disregard of truth by failing to appropriately declare that knowing God and knowing His precious truth is indeed experiential, in the sense that our relationship with God is real and personal (Phil 3)!

Many churches today, if they had to put a slogan on their culture of worship it would read: “Come experience God, we will turn the lights low and crank the music up.”

And it’s possible to respond to this inappropriate overemphasis of experience by saying: “no experience, just truth!”

We would do well in committing our lives and dying for the truth - amen? Amen. But knowing the truth is never the end, truth is the means to the end and the end is knowing God.

And of course… we can’t know God apart from his truth can we? But knowing the person of Jesus Christ in his word, through His spirit is our aim.

Paul prays in Ephesians 3:17-19: “so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God.”