Knowing God

by J.I. Packer

to approach Bible study with no higher a motive than a desire to know all the answers, is the direct route to a state of self-satisfied self-deception. We need to guard our hearts against such an attitude, and pray to be kept from it.

He wanted to understand God’s truth in order that his heart might respond to it and his life be conformed to it.

Our concern must be to enlarge our acquaintance, not simply with the doctrine of God’s attributes, but with the living God whose attributes they are.

We must seek, in studying God, to be led to God.

we turn each truth that we learn about God into matter for meditation before God, leading to prayer and praise to God.

meditation is a lost art today, and Christian people suffer grievously from their ignorance of the practice.

God help us, then, to put our knowledge about God to this use, that we all may in truth “know the Lord.”

A little knowledge of God is worth more than a great deal of knowledge about him.

interest in theology, and knowledge about God, and the capacity to think clearly and talk well on Christian themes, is not at all the same thing as knowing him.

There is no peace like the peace of those whose minds are possessed with full assurance that they have known God, and God has known them, and that this relationship guarantees God’s favor to them in life, through death and on for ever. This is the peace of which Paul speaks in Romans 5:1—“Since

Lord, it belongs not to my care Whether I die or live; To love and serve Thee is my share, And this Thy grace must give. If life be long, I will be glad, That I may long obey; If short—then why should I be sad To soar to endless day?

First, we must recognize how much we lack knowledge of God. We must learn to measure ourselves, not by our knowledge about God, not by our gifts and responsibilities in the church, but by how we pray and what goes on in our hearts.

for the promise is that when we seek him with all our hearts, we shall surely find him—who can stand before the world to testify that they have known God.

“Let him that glories glory in this, that he understands and knows me”—for knowing God is a relationship calculated to thrill a person’s heart.

The Jesus who walks through the gospel story walks with Christians now, and knowing him involves going with him, now as then.

but the width of our knowledge about him is no gauge of the depth of our knowledge of him.

the perfection of his human life was achieved only by conflict with the devil.

Christian joy is greatest, when the cross is heaviest.

we ought not to hesitate to trust his wisdom, even when he leaves us in the dark.

Nothing can escape him; we may fool men, but we cannot fool God. He knows us, and judges us, as we really are.

So God is adequate in this further sense, that in knowing him fully we shall find ourselves fully satisfied, needing and desiring nothing more.