Musings on Life, Church, and God

Knowing God

ejdeviney — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:31:27 +0000

It is very rare that I find people that actually know God. I don’t mean knowing about God or having experienced God. I mean knowing him as a person, an actual living person, like you know a friend or family member or lover.

Even among believers, it’s terribly difficult to find someone who knows God. Plenty of people know about God and they believe what they know, but they don’t know him. Plenty of people have spiritual experiences where they encounter God, but these experiences haven’t transferred into true relationship.

Part of the problem is that people seem to think that knowing about a person means that you know them. But it doesn’t. Facts don’t equal friendship. The essence of a person cannot be quantified or defined. You can only discover that by knowing them face to face, spending time with them. You can only know God by spending time with him daily.

I don’t mean your typical “daily devotions.” I mean talking to God like a real person. Telling him what you really want to say, good and bad, and letting him talk back. Getting to know him the same way you would get to know anyone else, by having conversations of all types, even arguments and disagreements.

Ultimately, knowing God is what being a Christian is all about. It’s not about theology, apologetics, worldview, social justice, politics, morality, spiritual experiences, miracles or even getting into heaven. You can have all these things and never know God. I’m not saying these things are not involved, but they must flow out of knowing God or they will be in vain. He is the center and the source of everything else in the Christian life. Knowing him is the purpose of our existence and the reason for our creation.

As a Christian body, we need to get back to knowing God. Letting our witness, fellowship, doctrine, and practice flow out of knowing him and out of who he is. Only in this way can we get back to what God has made us to do. Only in this way can we break the chains of all the human traditions, all the things we think we are suppossed to be and do but that we can never seem to live up to. We must know God and him alone if we are to understand anything else.

The Unity of God and the Church

ejdeviney — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 04:10:08 +0000

So today I was reading about the attributes of God for my Christian Theology class and something in the reading got my brain ticking. The author of our text, Wayne Grudem was discussing the unity of God, which he defined as this: “God is not divided into parts, yet we see different attributes of God emphasized at different times.” (Grudem, Wayne. Bible Doctrine.) He then went on to discuss how we can’t, as limited humans, see all God’s attributes at once and how certain actions of God seem to display certain attributes more than other actions. However, we should never think that all of God’s attributes are not involved in all of his actions. He is still just when he forgives and still merciful when he punishes.

In some ways, God’s unity teaches us about the Church’s unity. The Church, the living body of Christ, also has many different attributes to its nature and many battles have been fought over which of these attributes are the most needed. Yet all of these attributes are needed; all make up the church’s nature. Individual churches may emphasize different aspects at different times (just like God seems to display certain attributes in certain actions), but the whole Church, in its diversity, always holds all the attributes of the body of Christ.

Intro to my blog

ejdeviney — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 16:44:15 +0000

Welcome to the blog of Elizabeth Deviney! If you know me, welcome; if you don’t, feel free to get to know me. Most of the posts on this blog will have to do with Christian life, theology, church practice, etc. A few of my posts will focus on happenings in my life or fun stuff like movie reviews.