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| “Formerly, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those who by nature are not gods.” |
| —Galatians 4:8 |
In the last blog post, I suggested that “Knowing God” seems like a pretty important part of spiritual formation. I also wrote about the first kind of “knowing,” the knowing of the mind. The assimilation of knowledge through nature, through Jesus Christ the Living Word, and through reading God’s written Word, the Bible.
In this blog post, I want to consider another kind of “knowing.” This knowing involves actual first-hand, palpable experience. It is a knowing of the soul—a spiritual knowing—the very essence of a woman or a man.
I suggested in the last blog post that the knowing of the mind was explicitly interconnected with the other human modalities—heart, soul, mind, and strength, or emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and physical. This remains true for this second kind of knowing: the knowing of the soul, or the knowing of the spiritual.
As I shared in the previous post, the Apostle Paul writing in Galatians 4:8-9 makes this declaration:
Formerly, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those who by nature are not gods.
But now that you know God—or rather are known by God—how is it that you are turning back to those weak and miserable forces? Do you wish to be enslaved by them all over again?
The second kind of knowing entwines actual experience with an exchange of the very essence of one’s mind and heart. This exchange takes place between a Lover and His beloved child. Such a knowing takes a lifetime of close fellowship.
This exchange involves a daily relationship of trust in the Lover by the beloved. It involves the bending of the beloved’s will to the greater, wiser, and more perfect will of the Lover. This pathway of will-bending obedience—of which I have so often written and of which I truly believe is our only contribution to our relationship with God—is held secure by the total, continual submission of our faulty human will to God’s divine and perfect will.
We learn how to submit to God by submitting to Him. We learn how to trust God by trusting Him. We learn how to love God by loving Him. We learn how to know God, with this second kind of knowing, by knowing Him.
Sometimes our lesson involves a swift change in direction that leaves us reeling. But, in the end, we learn how to expect the unexpected. We recognize that God always has our very best interest in mind. He wants us to succeed according to the plan and pathway that He has laid out before us.
Through our obedience to Him, God will enable us to experience the highest joy, the greatest sense of well-being, the enormity of His love and grace. And, at the end of our road in this life, we then will finally come to know God through a process that will last for eternity.
Based on a blog originally posted on Tuesday, July 7, 2015
