To Know Jesus

Posted on April 24, 2015 by Elizabeth

I am a learner by nature.

I love to read, to study, to delve deeply into what interests me.

My current confession is that the knowledge I have about God, about the Bible, can make me prideful at times. I went to a Christian elementary school and a Christian college. I’ve taken the Bible classes (including Jimmy Allen’s Romans class which has been around so long that my parents took his class when they went through school!), studied the texts, aced the tests.

For someone who never sought after a degree in ministry, I certainly know a lot about Jesus. Knowing Jesus Himself, however, is another matter altogether.

I have to be careful. I too often read books about Jesus rather than reading His Words. I too often would rather have deep theological discussions about Jesus than talk directly to Him. I too often prefer to listen to a speaker expound on the life of Christ than listen to Jesus Himself.

I could tell whether I know about Jesus, at least when I was in school, by how well I did on tests. How can we tell whether we know Jesus?

Jesus told His disciples that His sheep know His voice, that they can follow Him because they are able to recognize His voice.

I sometimes think I only recognize His voice because it is that part inside of me telling me to do something I really don’t want to do!

David, the one God called a man after His heart, gives us a clue to this in how he spoke with God in the Psalms. Perhaps one of the reasons he knew God so well is because he spoke to God about everything…happiness, sorrow, anger, joy, jealousy, revenge…truly everything.

Perhaps just being in the habit of speaking with Jesus about everything throughout every day is what brings us closer to Him. Perhaps just practicing His presence is what helps us to truly know Jesus. Brother Lawrence, a 17th century monk, showed us how to do this as he went about his daily work in the kitchen of his monastery.

Brother Lawrence spoke of conversing with God as much when he was washing dishes as when he was kneeling in the chapel.

We must know before we can love. In order to know God, we must often think of Him. And when we come to love Him, we shall then also think of Him often, for our heart will be with our treasure.

Like many things, it seems to be a matter of training our minds to continually return to God.

I think I can end no better than with Brother Lawrence’s words, words that I need to hear as I strive to know Jesus in more intimate ways than simply knowing about Him:

You need not cry very loud. He is nearer to us than we are aware. Every one is capable of such familiar conversation with God; some more, some less. He knows what we can do. Let us begin then. Perhaps He expects but one generous resolution on our part. Have courage.

Have courage and begin.

Art credits: The Good Shepherd by James Tissot; Anointing of David by Alexandr Ivanov; Brother Lawrence in the Kitchen in a book published by Fleming Revell Co.

Our Jealous God

Posted on February 21, 2014 by Elizabeth

The Bible is the Word of God. It is God speaking to us, revealing Himself to us so that we can know Him, know how much He loves us and so that we can learn how to love Him in return.

This Bible of ours is a beautiful book of love. And there are parts of the Bible that are downright disturbing, parts that don’t adhere to our black and white notions of God. We like to gloss over these, to skim over them so that we don’t have to think about them, but they just won’t go away. There are parts of God’s Word that don’t fit the image we have of God. They don’t fit the sort of God we want God to be. Even God the Son does and says some absurd and strange things. Like the cursing of the fig tree. Who, for the love of God, would curse a tree because it is not bearing fruit in the winter? How could that action possibly have been done for the love of God?

Another of these disturbing pieces is God as a jealous God. We tend to think of jealousy as weak, as petty, as fear. We think of it as wishing that we were and had what we are not and do not. But God is in everything and by Him everything lives and moves and has its being. How can both of these be true?

We don’t always get a resolution of the images of God that don’t fit, these pieces of God we can’t make sense of. This one, though, has become clearer lately through reading Amazing Grace by Kathleen Norris. She speaks of the jealousy of God as mother love, as a lion or tiger protecting her young with passion and fierceness. This jealousy of God is the kind of jealousy that protects her vulnerable children from all that would hurt them, from all that would steal their joy.

It makes sense, then, that one of the times this image of God is given to us is in the first of the Ten Commandments. These commandments were meant to show us how much we need God, to teach us how life works and the way we will be most happy. So if God is jealous to keep false gods away from us, it is the jealousy that wants to protect us from all that would harm our souls.

God’s jealousy allows us to trust Him.

Who, after all, would trust a God, a parent, spouse, or lover, who said to us, “I really love you, but I don’t care at all what you do or who you become.”? ~ Kathleen Norris

It is resolutions like this, resolutions that show that what seems disturbing is all somehow out of love and holiness, resolutions that help us trust for the unknown, disquieting pieces. They help us trust that God is holy and is love and is working to make all of us and all of this world into what it was created to be.

Resolutions like this help us trust that God is a jealous God, “who loves us enough to care when we stray. And who has given us commandments to help us find the way home.” ~ Kathleen Norris

Art Credit: Moses Smashing the Tablet of the Law by Rembrandt

Mystery

Posted on January 17, 2014 by Elizabeth

Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of godliness; He was manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory. ~ I Timothy 3.16

In a world of science and proofs and self-evident truths, we serve a God of mystery.

We claim to know God, to understand His character, but the truth is that our God is unknowable. Even as we speak what we know to be true about God, we do not understand how those truths work, how they relate to God, how they fit together.

There are words in the Bible, stories and descriptions about God that make me uncomfortable. Verses and paragraphs I would rather push aside or gloss over because I do not know how to explain them.

Our churches train us to prove, to argue, to set forth evidence for God. They train us to thoroughly explain His character, to make rational aspects of His works.

Yet our churches are trained by our culture. Our culture that says that knowledge is power. It says that what is worth anything is knowable, what is valued is quantifiable.

…the important truths, that knowledge is power, that knowledge is safety, and that knowledge is happiness. ~ Thomas Jefferson

As children, we understood that there was mystery in our world and it stirred and excited something deep within us. As adults, we become knowers, seeking to understand all things.

Childhood is motivated by wonder, and the task of adulthood is not to eliminate wonder but to expand it. ~ Ken Myers

Some find the idea of mystery frightening, wanting to know and to understand. Don’t we know God as revealed in His Word and in Christ?

Our attempt to speak confidently of God in the face of modern skepticism, a skepticism we suspect also grips our lives as Christians, betrays a certainty inappropriate for a people who worship a crucified God. ~ Stanley Hauerwas

Yes, we know God and we know things about God. Knowing, however, means more than just intellect. It is much deeper than that. The full revelation of God does not make us want to list the things we know, to produce a dissertation full of facts about God.

Rather, the full revelation of God makes us want to bow in worship of the One who is mystery.

Art credits: photographs of space from NASA; DNA strand by Tomislav Alajbeg

Speaking With My Father

Posted on June 28, 2013 by Elizabeth

They speak to me about cookies and caring, about flowers and family, about Legos and love in action.

They speak almost continually, telling stories and asking questions, needing to know and wanting me to know.

Their speaking to me is simplicity itself. They feel curious and they ask, they become excited and they tell, they are frightened and they listen. They speak what is in their hearts and minds, and they listen to my answers and my reassurances.

You have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!”

I do not speak to my Father with such simplicity.

I worry that I do not ask for the right things, I fear that my attitude is faulty, I think I know that I am not silent enough.

Should I pray “I thank You that You hear me” or “let Thy will be done”? I do not know which is right.

Shall I pray in gratitude for beauty given to me while others are mired in ugliness all around?

If I ask for hard things to be removed am I being ungrateful for the maturity that hard things bring?

The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God,

They do not worry if the way in which they speak with me is good. They do not stumble over words, attempting to choose just the right ones.

When they ask for wrong things, when they speak ugly thoughts, when they refuse to listen, I love them.

I help them know which way to ask, how best to speak, and I love them.

When they are frightened or upset, when they do not know the words they need, I search their hearts and interpret, and I love them.

For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

I am grateful for their simplicity.

I know them. I know their hearts, and want them to know me. No anger or disappointment comes when error is made. I love for them to speak easily, not fearful over content or word choice, but simply speaking and listening, learning to know and to be known.

You have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!”…And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.

May I, like them, speak simply, without worry or fear, learning to know, and resting in the peace of being known and being loved.

Scriptures are taken from Romans 8.14-30

Can I Really Know God?

Posted on December 2, 2011 by Elizabeth

“This is one of the most beautiful things to me.”

I look at her, my mommy-shepherd, wanting her to continue.

“A mother who knows her baby, who knows what her baby needs by being completely attuned to the cues her baby gives her.”

Yes. This is beautiful.

Our conversation drifts to the back of my mind until I am reading Psalm 139, which begins like this:

O Lord, you have searched me and you know me.

My mind leaps back to the beauty of a mother knowing her baby as I read more of the psalm:

…you perceive my thoughts from afar…you are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O Lord…For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb…All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

God knows me.

God, the One Who weighs the clouds heavy with snow, knows me even more deeply than a mommy can know her baby.

This is beautiful.

And then I read something that I have read many times. This time, with the beauty of God’s knowledge of me fresh in my mind, I am stunned.

Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

The wonder of this takes my breath away and I want to check, to be sure this is true.

I know that the Old and New Testaments were written in different languages, but I check my Strong’s for the meanings of “know” in both chapters and they are remarkably similar. It is the same kind of knowing.

We will know God as deeply as He knows us.

Stop for just a moment and let that fill up your heart.

Lately my heart has been too full of the mystery of God. I often struggle to see Him in the midst of the busyness, the hurts and disappointments of life.

My heart needs to hear this, to savor it: God wants me to know Him.

I search for more of this truth. If you, too, need this, go slowly. Let God breathe these words into your distant heart and draw you close to Him.

I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me – just as the Father knows me and I know the Father.

I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better.

For I desire mercy and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.

This is what the LORD says: ‘Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom…but let him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD.’

I will give them a heart to know me, that I am the LORD.

I am filled with this beauty.

God knows all of the deepest pieces of me and in all of His knowledge of my dark places, He desires that I know Him just as deeply.

Beautiful.

Scriptures in order: I Corinthians 13.12; John 10.14-15; Ephesians 1.17; Hosea 6.6; Jeremiah 9.23-24; Jeremiah 24.7
Painting is Christ in the House of Martha and Mary by Johannes Vermeer