Knowing God

I have had a lot of people in the past ask me if they can have assurance if they truly know God. I can resonate with this question because throughout the Christian walk we all have doubts and the dark nights of the soul. Can we know if we have a relationship with God? If so how? How can we know if we truly know God?

The following is adapted from J.I. Packer's classic Knowing God.

"Knowing God is crucially important for the living of our lives. We are cruel to ourselves if we try to live in this world without knowing about the God whose world it is and who runs it. The world becomes a strange, mad, painful place, and life in it a disappointing and unpleasant business, for those who do not know God. Disregard who God is and you end up wasting your life and losing your soul."

Evidence of Knowing God

1.) Those who know God have great energy for God
This energy for God is not just about public gestures. In fact, it doesn't even start there. People who know their God before anything else are people who pray, and the first point where their zeal and energy for God's glory come to expression is in their prayers. We might be old, or ill, or otherwise limited by our physical situation. But we can all pray about the lack of God in everyday life all around us. If, however, there is in us little energy for such prayer, and little consequent practice of it, this is a sure sign that as yet we scarcely know our God.

2.) Those who know God have great thoughts of God
In the Old Testament, Daniel is facing the might and splendor of the Babylonian empire which had swallowed up Palestine and the prospect of further great world empires to follow. It dominates the people of God by every standard of human calculation, but the book of Daniel as a whole forms a dramatic remind that the God of Israel is King of kings and Lord of lords, "that Heaven rules" (Dan. 4:26), that God's hand is on history at every point, that history, indeed, is no more than "his story," the unfolding of his eternal plan, and that the kingdom which will triumph in the end is God's
What do you think about when you think about God? Does his tremendous sense of Holy majesty, moral perfection, and gracious faithfulness keep us humble and dependent, awed and obedient, as it did Daniel? By this test, too, we may measure how much, or how little, we know God.

3.) Those who know God show great boldness for God
Daniel and his friends were men who stuck their necks out. This was not foolhardiness. They knew what they were doing. They had counted the cost. They had measured the risk. This risk got Daniel thrown in the lion's den and got all of them thrown in the fiery furnace. They were well aware what the outcome of their actions would be unless God miraculously intervened, as in fact he did. It does not worry them that others of God's people see the matter differently and do not stand with them. By this test we may also measure our own knowledge of God.

4.) Those who know God have great contentment in God.
There is no peace like the peace of those whose minds are possessed with full assurance that they have known God, and God has known them, and that this relationship guarantees God's favor to them in life, through death and on forever. This is the peace which Paul speaks in Romans 5:1 -- "since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ -- and whose substance he analyzes in full in Romans 8:1.

Do we desire such knowledge of God? Then 2 things follow.

First, we must recognize how much we lack knowledge of God. We must learn to measure ourselves, not by our knowledge about God, not by our gifts and responsibilities in the church, but by how we pray and what goes on in our hearts.

Second, we must seek Jesus. When he was on earth, he invited ordinary people to company with him; thus they came to know him, and in knowing him to know his Father.