Well, how well DO you know God? Or perhaps we could ask it like this…how WELL do you know God? Then again, how well do I know God?   Finally ask, how well do I KNOW God?

   Each of these questions puts the emphasis on different words of the same question thus needing a different explicit answer to each one.

    Firstly, how well DO I know God? Do I know Him at all? Have I had any dealings with Him? We can’t really know a person until we’ve had some experience of interaction with them.     

   For instance, if I were asked “do you know Queen Elizabeth”, I might answer yes, I know who she is, but that is not actually KNOWING her. I have read much about her, and I know that she has been a great horsewoman, and that she has pet corgi dogs. I could reel off a whole host of other things about her that I have read. But none of that means that I really know the inner person that she is.

    This is the same with our knowledge of God…we might know a lot about Him, but unless we have experienced His forgiveness and subsequently His peace, we do not really know Him at all. Until we have been in the depths of despair and turned to Him for comfort and solace, we cannot know Him fully. We need to come to Him with a contrite heart for the wrongs we have done to experience His forgiveness, and then we can say we know Him well. (Psalm 51:17)

  We come to the next question…..how well do I know Him? This gets down to the personal pronoun, I. It indicates that He must know me as well, and in fact we are told that He does indeed know us from the inside to the outside whether we like it or not. I cannot hide anything from Him, and until I can say wholeheartedly, “Search me oh God, and know my heart today, Try me and know my thoughts and see if there be any wicked way in me” (Psalm 139:23-24) ” I do not really want Him to find me out!

   After having pondered on, and answered these questions honestly, then we can evaluate how well we really do know God. It will be dreadful in a coming day when God pronounces on different ones, “Depart from Me, I never knew you!” (Matthew 7:21-23) when many of them will have been engaged in doing what they thought was His work..

   If  God feels far away from you,  guess who moved? Well, you might ask, “How do I get near to God?”

It takes a contrite  heart and a confession of sin to start with but  then it takes time, after that.  Knowing God well will not come automatically, it takes time and effort. We need to ask ourselves how much time we put into this,  and to remember that if we draw near to God, He will draw near to us (James 4:8). When we take the first step towards Him, He will take ten towards us!

Let’s make sure that we do this today!!