“O taste and see that the Lord is good.” Psalm 34:8

Do you know God? 

Notice, I didn’t ask if you believed in God, I asked if you KNOW Him?

It is one thing for us to say we believe in God, but it is another thing all together to know Him personally.

Excerpt from A.W. Tozer’s book, The Pursuit of God:

“To most people God is an inference, not a reality.  He is a deduction from evidence which they consider adequate, but He remains personally unknown to the individual.  “He must be,” they say, “therefore we believe He is.”  Others do not go even so far as this; they know of him only by hearsay.

They have never bothered to think the matter out for themselves, but have heard about Him from others, and have put belief in Him into the back of their minds along with various odds and ends that make up their total creed.

To many others, God is but an ideal, another name for goodness or beauty or truth; or He is law or life o the creative impulse back of the phenomena of existence.

These notions about God are many and varied, but they who hold them have one thing in common; They do not know God in personal experience. 

The possibility of intimate acquaintance with Him has not entered their minds.  While admitting His existence they do not think of Him as being knowable in the sense that we know things or people. (below emphasis mine.)

“My sheep hear my voice.” (John 10:27)

“O taste and see that the Lord is good.” (Psalm 34:8)

“Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.”  (Mathew 5:8)

What can all this mean except that we have in our hearts organs by means of which we can know God as certainly as we know material things through our familiar five senses?

We apprehend the physical world by exercising the faculties given us for that purpose, and we possess spiritual faculties by means of which we can know God and the spiritual world if we will obey the Spirit’s urge and begin to use them.

A spiritual kingdom lies all about us, enclosing us, embracing us, altogether within reach of our inner selves, waiting for us to recognize it.

God Himself is here waiting for our response to His presence. This eternal world will come alive to us the moment we begin to reckon upon its reality.” (End of Tozer excerpt).

It’s often hard for me to understand how many people (Including Christians) do not grasp the fact that God is a real Person, and in the deep of His mighty nature He thinks, wills, enjoys, feels, loves, desires and suffers as any other person may.

Before I knew the Bible, I knew the Person of God.  As the old song says, “He walks with me and talks with me and calls me His own.”

When I first came to know Him, it seemed that He was chasing me all the time.  Everywhere I would turn, there He was.  But now it seems the relationship has changed a bit, and it is I who is relentlessly chasing after Him.  I can’t get enough of Him. 

He is everything to me and the more I ‘taste’ of Him, the more I thirst and hunger for MORE of Him! 

Do you find yourself longing after God?

This morning & again in worship this Sunday, I want to do what Tozer seeks to help us do in his amazing book, The Pursuit of God.  I want to deliberately encourage all of you to seek this mighty longing after God.

For as Tozer says: “The lack of it has brought us to our present low estate.  Complacency is a deadly foe of all spiritual growth.  Acute desire must be present or there will be no manifestation of Christ to His people.  He waits to be wanted.”

Friends, seek to have a personal relationship with God today and every day.  If you want to see more of His glory, thirst after Him.  He’s not an entity, He’s not a power, He’s a Person!!!  Get to know Him. He wants you to want to know Him. He waits for you to want Him.  He waits for you to seek to be in His presence.  

Let’s all prepare our hearts before we come to worship HIM on Sunday.  Let’s ask Him to reveal Himself to us.  Let’s seek the Person, not just the power!  

Pray this prayer of Tozer’s with me today:

“O God, I have tasted thy goodness, and it has both satisfied me and made me thirsty for more.  I am painfully conscious of my need of further grace.  I am ashamed of my lack of desire.  O God, the Triune God, I want to want Thee; I long to be filled with longing; I thirst to be made more thirsty still.  Show me Thy glory, I pray Thee, that so I may know Thee indeed.  Begin in mercy a new work of love within me.  Say to my soul, “Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.” Then give me grace to rise and follow Thee up from this misty lowland where I have wandered so long.  In Jesus’ name, amen.