Week Five - Day Five: Self-Revealing

“What is that which gleams through me and smites my heart without wounding it? I am both a-shudder and a-glow. A-shudder in so far as I am unlike it, a-glow in so far as I am like it.” St Augustine

God is holy! He is absolutely unique.

This is awesome, but as we have been saying it is also difficult. God’s holiness means that there is no workable frame of reference for us in our attempts to acquaint ourselves with Him.

Let me explain what I mean. You know how when you are exposed to a new set of information or to some new approach for the first time, you usually use things that you already know as a frame of reference to help you understand the new thing. For example, think of learning a new language. “Okay, they have a different word for everything,” we realize when we first hear it, “but their sentences have a certain structure just like ours. So I’ve just got to pick up the structure and learn all these new words.” A very tall task, no doubt, but at least we know where to start. At least it makes sense … sort of.

But what if we were confronted with an alien species who communicated to one another through something like mental telepathy using a capacity that we did not possess? Then we’d be sunk. We’d have no workable frame of reference.

This is not too dissimilar from the situation we find ourselves in when confronted with God – at least when it comes to really knowing Him.

We can know a great deal about Him through His creation as we noted on Day Three of this week. He has made sure of that. We can know even more about Him as we look at the “exact representation of His being” in Jesus. But this is still a long way from really knowing Him. And many of us have experienced the frustration of that “long way” for long periods of our lives. We may even hear people speak about the intimacy of their relationship with God with frustration. We feel like we don’t even have a frame of reference. “Are they making that stuff up? Or what do they have that I don’t have?”

Good news alert! I believe in, and I’ve experienced amazing intimacy with God and profound clarity in my understanding of Him. For me, it has been far less consistent than I would want – in fact, it has been fleeting for much of my life with Him. But the experience of Him – while often overwhelming when it comes – is intoxicating. Those encounters give meaning and purpose to everything else in my life.

How are we able to know God?

Enough with the testimony. Let’s get to the principle. Here’s why we are able to experience God in this way. Here’s why we can know Him, not just information about Him, but really know Him. God has changed us.

The writers of the New Testament use a variety of images to describe this, but they are united in their wonder at it. We’ve received the Spirit; we’ve been brought to life; we’ve been redeemed; we’ve been filled; we’ve been made a new creation. Wow! This is just a sampling of the images they used to describe this metamorphosis.

Our encounter with God – beginning with the “be born again” business – leaves us changed. Remember two weeks ago when we compared our internal spiritual life to a fire? It needs fuel and oxygen we said. That fire within us is the process of our spirits interacting with God’s Spirit. It is changing us! Really!

Let’s pause for a minute. If you are on the outside looking in at faith, I want to invite you to ask God to do this work in your heart and your life. We have already talked about the fire within us. Ask God to ignite that fire. Offer yourself to Him. Confess that you don’t get it and that you have tried to build a life based on not getting it. Confess that there have been many missteps as a result. Give those to Him as well. And then surrender. For most of us, we have already made the decision to give our lives to Him. We have invited Him in to govern us and we have experienced a measure of His changing us. We have even sensed His presence at times – really sensed it!

Here’s the point: those two things go together. We have sensed His presence because He has changed us. Without that change, we cannot experience Him; we cannot know Him! Without being brought to life, without being filled, without receiving the Spirit, we are trying to understand alien telepathy without the capacity needed to do so. We may look at the stars and be amazed. We may know that they point to SOMETHING beyond themselves. We may admire Jesus and we may believe that there is SOMETHING that fueled his life and toward which his life points, but we are powerless to grasp it. It is out of reach.

But thanks be to God! When we come to Him in faith, He receives us and He changes us and He gives us the capacity to fully know Him.

Before You Start Your Day

1. To reinforce this great truth, let’s look at Paul’s explanation of it in 1 Corinthians 2:6-16. I have bolded significant phrases to underscore this morning’s reflection.

   1 Corinthians 2:6-16

   (6) We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. (7) No, we speak of God's secret wisdom, a wisdom that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. (8) None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. 9However, as it is written:

   "No eye has seen,
         no ear has heard,
         no mind has conceived
         what God has prepared for those who love him"—

   (10) but God has revealed it to us by his Spirit.

   The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. (11) For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man's spirit within him? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. (12) We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us. (13) This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words. (14) The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. 15The spiritual man makes judgments about all things, but he himself is not subject to any man's judgment:

   (16) "For who has known the mind of the Lord
         that he may instruct him?"

   But we have the mind of Christ.

2. Wow! That is awesome stuff! By way of review, how do we know God?
3. Don’t catapult into your day before you thank God for rearranging the atoms in your life, enabling you to really know Him. Okay, I made that up, but who knows? The change He makes in us is at least that dramatic. Maybe He has rearranged the atoms!
4. Now let’s spend a few minutes again with the opening stanza of Psalm 19. Review what you memorized yesterday and try to add to it.