What Does it Mean to Know the Lord?
There are so many professing Christians who don’t know the Living God. They haven’t encountered Grace Personified. Granted, grace is a very hard concept to understand and can only begin to be grasped through divine revelation. To know the Lord is to love the Lord, and evidence of this love is obedience to His Word. Christians don’t obey God out of fear, but out of deep love for Him and reverential awe toward Him.
God is not hiding; He wants us to seek Him, and He promises that we will find Him when we seek Him with all our heart. God doesn’t lie. Seek Him with a sincere heart, and He will reveal Himself to you. The first step in seeking the Lord is through His Holy Word. The Bible reveals Jesus to us from Genesis to Revelation. No sermon or book written by man will ever compare to the Holy Spirit illuminating God’s Word in our hearts. He makes the Word come alive. Before you read the Bible, invite Him to be with you and to give you knowledge, insight, revelation, and understanding of the Word.
There is head knowledge of the Lord, but true knowledge of Him comes from Him revealing Himself to us through our life experiences. This is the experiential knowledge of God. The more we know God, the more we become aware of the depths of our sinful nature. The closer we get to Him, the more we are refined and purified like gold. No one seeking intimacy with Him will escape this process, for God is an all-consuming fire. Sin cannot exist in His Presence, so getting close to Him requires us to let go of any sinful habits. The sins that have held people in bondage—such as addictions—are broken off as we come to know God as a Consuming Fire.
To know the Lord is to become familiar with all His beautiful characteristics. We get to know Him as Holy—completely set apart and perfect in righteousness. Getting to know Him as Holy invokes a response of repentance and falling on our faces in worship, just like the Prophet Isaiah cried out, “Woe is me, a man of unclean lips,” when he saw a glimpse of God’s Holiness.
If we had any semblance of righteousness of our own, it would be brought low at the revelation of how filthy we are compared to such a majestic and Holy God. God’s Holiness is the only characteristic of Him repeated three times consecutively in the Bible to show emphasis. Being exposed to His Holiness brings about a true fear of the Lord. One cannot get a glimpse of His Holiness and continue to walk without the fear of the Lord.
At the revelation of His Holiness, we realize just how spiritually bankrupt we are and how there is nothing good in our hearts. “The heart is desperately wicked; who can know it?” the Bible says. As we get to know God more, our lives will be turned upside down. This is because true knowledge of God is experiential knowledge of Him. This is the difference between professing Christians and born-again believers. Born-again believers know God because they have seen Him move in their lives. This is why true believers can never deny Him or denounce the faith.
“They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us.”
—1 John 2:19 (KJV)1 John 2:19 (KJV)
