Knowing God

And this is eternal life:

 it means to know

 (to perceive, recognize, become acquainted with, and understand)

 You, the only true and real God,

 and to know Him, Jesus Christ, 

whom You have sent.

John 17:3 (AMP)

Everywhere I have turned recently I am encountering writings about knowing God.  I came across a little booklet stuck away inside a book on my shelf that talks about friendship with God.  It states that God's purpose for our lives is to have a close personal and intimate relationship with him.  Out of that relationship everything else is derived - our needs our met and we become channels of blessing for those around us in whatever place we find ourselves.

Then this morning on www.aholyexperience.com comes this quote:

For millions of Christians…God is no more real than He is to the non-Christian. They go through life trying to love an ideal and be loyal to a mere principle. Over against all this cloudy vagueness stands the clear scriptural doctrine that God can be known in personal experience. 

A loving Personality dominates the Bible, walking among the trees of the garden and breathing fragrance over every scene. Always a living Person is present, speaking, pleading, loving, working, and manifesting Himself whenever and wherever His people have the receptivity necessary to receive the manifestation. 

The Bible assumes as a self-evident fact that men can know God with at least the same degree of immediacy as they know any other person or thing that comes within the field of their experience. The same terms are used to express the knowledge of God as are used to express knowledge of physical things.  ‘O taste and see that the Lord is good.’…the whole import of the Scripture is toward this belief. 

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 five senses?~A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God

There is nothing more important in life than to experience this relationship with God.  We have been made in his image.  I am a person because He is a person and He is a person that I can relate to intimately. Let us ask, seek and knock until the door is opened, putting aside all fear and reaching out to a God who is there to meet us. May I be drawn closer to him each day.

Taste and see that the Lord is good. Oh, the joys of those who take refuge in him!

Psalms 34:8 (NLT)