Experiencing God
The Company We Keep, prt. 1
Wildwind Community Church
David Flowers
April 30, 2009
Ps 34:8 (NLT)
8Taste and see that the LORD is good. Oh, the joys of those who take refuge in him!
Experience is the basis of relationship. If you know someone, you have experienced them in some way. What does it mean to experience someone? It simply means to have experiences with them. You have experienced your boss. You have experienced your teachers at school. Those of you who know one another have experienced each other. If you bump into a person on a crowded street, you experience that person in some way. And of course you have experienced your spouse, and you have experienced that person in ways – both positive and negative – that you have not experienced anyone else. Experience is the basis of relationship.
See, to experience something is to come to know it. The more experience you accumulate with a person, the more you will know them. That’s why in the Old Testament when it talks about sex it says it this way:
Ge 4:1 (KJV)
1And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the LORD.
Ge 4:17 (KJV)
17And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch: and he builded a city, and called the name of the city, after the name of his son, Enoch.
Ge 4:25 (KJV)
25And Adam knew his wife again; and she bare a son, and called his name Seth…
To have sex with someone is a way of experiencing that person, and to experience someone is to know them, and to really know someone is to love them. But what I love here with the sex reference is that is helps us understand knowing as something that goes far beyond a collection of facts jostling around in our minds. Truly knowing someone comes from experiencing them deeply – not necessarily sexually – but deeply. It is safe to say the more you know someone, the more you have experienced them.
In the mid-90’s, a pastor and teacher named Henry Blackaby set the Christian world on fire with his groundbreaking book Experiencing God. He lays out seven realities in the book, the last of which is this:
You come to know God by experience as you obey Him and He accomplishes His work through you.
You come to know God how? By experience. Experience is the basis of relationship. Let me say this as clearly as possible. You do not primarily come to know God through listening to sermons. You do not primarily come to know God through reading books about him. You do not primarily come to know God by talking about him or preaching about him, or by quitting your job and going into “professional ministry.” The primary way you come to know God is by experience, as you obey him. Obedience is the context for knowing God. This no big deal. All relationships have a context that is appropriate for that relationship. God has submitted to us and continues to submit to us in Jesus and we submit to God in obedience. Healthy relationships always involve mutual submission. So obedience is the context (environment) for knowing God.
I was talking to Sarah Oskey in the office last week and she was talking about Mary and how she must have been affected by seeing the empty tomb after the resurrection. That set me to thinking about what it would do to someone to have an experience like that and how it would have expanded her understanding of Jesus so drastically. Then I started thinking about how experience with people always helps us know them better. As we experience someone, we are “treated” to new and different aspects of their character and personality. And that got me to thinking about how the journey with God is a journey of experience. Some would say it’s a journey of emotion. Some would say it’s a journey of belief. Some would call it a journey of commitment. And though all of those things are included, they all spring from experience. I will feel strongly about what I have experienced. I will believe deeply what I have experienced. I will commit willingly to what I have experienced. In fact, I cannot feel strongly about that which I have not experienced. I cannot believe deeply what I have not experienced. And I ultimately cannot commit very strongly to what I have not experienced. I believe this is the problem with the church today – millions of people are trying to live Christian lives on the basis of very little actual experience with (knowledge of) God. Experience is the basis of relationship. And experience is a way of knowing. The only way to experience God consistently is to obey him. Let me tell you a story about that.
Now what can we learn from the experience of that couple? What we can learn is that in deciding to value relationships above all else, in choosing not to protect their rights and go for what was theirs, they still found themselves taken care of. And what we know is that this is precisely how God has told us he will act toward us.
Mt 6:30-33 (The Message)
30“If God gives such attention to the appearance of wildflowers—most of which are never even seen—don’t you think he’ll attend to you, take pride in you, do his best for you? 31What I’m trying to do here is to get you to relax, to not be so preoccupied with getting, so you can respond to God’s giving. 32People who don’t know God and the way he works fuss over these things, but you know both God and how he works. 33Steep your life in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions. Don’t worry about missing out. You’ll find all your everyday human concerns will be met.
Had our friends rushed out and fended for themselves, they would have endangered this important relationship AND probably taken action that would have denied God the opportunity to provide for them. In choosing to not be preoccupied with getting, in choosing to steep themselves in God-reality, God-initiative, and God-provisions, and not worry about missing out, our friends allowed God the space to work. Some might say it was just coincidence, but remember we are talking about experience. We experience God through obedience. When we choose to obey God, and we find that again and again God is “coming through” for us in the ways he has promised he would in his Word, then we are actually experiencing him through our obedience, and our faith in God and in his Word grows. We are coming to know, beyond question or dispute, that God is faithful and will be true to his word. Those who obey God based on what little they know will increasingly come to know God more and more not based on some irrational “leap of faith,” but on solid knowledge, springing from experience, of how God operates. Those who do not make a habit of obeying God will never come to this knowledge of Him because they will pursue their own ends. In pursuing their own ends, they will not experience God. Lack of experience is of course lack of knowledge and those who are not committed to obedience will never come to know. Those who obey will come not simply to believe, to trust, to feel, to sense, or to suspect, but to know God.
Now you might say, “What about faith? What about belief? What about trusting in what we cannot see? I thought the Christian life was primarily about believing and about faith, not about knowing.” My friend, that is simply not the case. In fact, knowing is what makes faith possible. Let me explain to you how this works.
When I married Christy, I knew her to some extent. We had dated for a few years and come to know each other fairly well. It was based on what I knew about Christy that I chose to believe in her – to place my faith and trust in her that she would be faithful to me for a lifetime as my wife. Had I for one second suspected that this would not be the case, I wouldn’t have married her at all. I placed my faith in Christy based on my knowledge of who she was. And my knowledge of who she was was based on actual experiences I had had with her. I had experienced her to be a moral and deeply good person. I had experienced her to be someone who wanted God’s will for her life. I had experienced her, in that brief period of time, to be someone who kept her commitments. My choice to marry Christy was not an unexplainable leap of faith, or some irrational thing I did based on a whim. That’s the last thing it was. Rather it was a calculated decision that I could trust the one who had been faithful to me in the past to also be faithful to me in the future. And that is true for the majority of marriages. Most people, when they marry, are making a gigantic commitment of faith, but that huge commitment makes knowledge even MORE important, not less! Because I was going to trust Christy to be faithful to me for a lifetime, it was important that I be assured of the kind of person she was and that she was in fact worthy of my trust. My friends, it is extremely important for you to have actual knowledge of something you are asked to believe in. Why do we do careful premarital counseling? To increase a couple’s knowledge and experience of each other. God says,
Ho 4:6 (NIV)
6…my people are destroyed from lack of knowledge.
It is on the basis of knowledge and experience that a couple is in the best position to determine whether the massive faith commitment they are about to make is reasonable. Let me explain how that works with God.
In the book of Exodus chapter 1, we see that the people of Israel are in slavery in Egypt. They’ve been there for 400 years. Their national and personal identities have been obliterated by centuries of captivity. Moses goes to Pharaoh and demands that he release the Hebrew people. Of course Pharaoh will not do so and so we then have the account of the plagues. Now what impact do you think this had on the Hebrew people, as they saw these amazing things happening around them? It showed them that God was near, God was present, and God was willing to intervene to accomplish his purposes. Then they finally get out of Egypt and they’re in front of the Red Sea and they stand there as it opens to clear a way for them, and then closes in on the Egyptian soldiers who were in pursuit. And do you know what happened then? God begins talking to his people using language like this:
Jos 24:5-7 (The Message)
5I sent Moses and Aaron. I hit Egypt hard with plagues and then led you out of there. 6I brought your ancestors out of Egypt. You came to the sea, the Egyptians in hot pursuit with chariots and cavalry, to the very edge of the Red Sea! 7“Then they cried out for help to GOD. He put a cloud between you and the Egyptians and then let the sea loose on them. It drowned them. “You watched the whole thing with your own eyes…
God says this again and again. Remember what I have done. Why does God say this? Because their knowledge of what he had done yesterday – their experience – was to be the continual basis for what they were asked to believe God would do today and tomorrow.
My friends, God does not expect you to take an irrational leap of faith. God does not expect you to step out of something into nothing. God does not expect you to believe in him against overwhelming evidence to the contrary. God does not expect you to commit to what you cannot know. In fact God wants exactly the opposite.
Ps 34:8 (NLT)
8Taste and see that the LORD is good. Oh, the joys of those who take refuge in him!
God wants you to trust him for today and tomorrow based on your knowledge of what he has done yesterday. Then, based on your commitment to God that comes from knowledge of who God has been in the past, God will sometimes ask you to trust in him through times that will exceed and enlarge your knowledge.
Let’s go back to marriage. I had experienced Christy as someone who kept her commitments and was true to her word. I had experienced enough of this, I believed, to trust that she would indeed be faithful to me. However, that was in a time of innocence. The time before words had been said that would leave scars – no couple gets far down the road without them. That was before financial difficulties and raising babies and graduate school and job stress and growing up. Could we whether those storms? We had never experienced them before. All I knew was that I was willing to place my faith in Christy. It was faith that exceeded my knowledge of her at the time, and would come to enlarge my knowledge of her over time! Based on the little bit of knowledge and insight and experience I had with her, I was willing to trust her far beyond the knowledge I had. As I trusted her, my trust placed her in a position that allowed her to be faithful, to grow into the kind of person who is capable of sticking through those hard times. Had I chosen then not to trust her because we had never experienced the really hard times together, we would never have gotten married because it is only through the actual living out of a committed relationship that you are in a position to find out that someone is trustworthy. But you enter into that relationship, hopefully, not with anything like blind faith, but based on your solid and extensive experience of them having been trustworthy so far.
Ps 34:8 (NLT)
8Taste and see that the LORD is good. Oh, the joys of those who take refuge in him!
Experience is the basis of relationship. Don’t let anybody tell you that the most important thing in the Christian life is commitment. Don’t let anybody tell you that all that matters is faith and if you have faith you don’t need knowledge and experience. Don’t let anybody tell you that conviction is all that matters, or that faith is something we choose to believe against all evidence to the contrary. That’s the last thing faith is. Faith is the willingness to trust someone on the basis of past experience, even when the current circumstances exceed one’s past experience. As the one who is trusted in delivers in the expected ways, what had been faith becomes knowledge, and faith is therefore enlarged.
That is what God asks of you. Not blind faith. Not irrational trust. Not close-minded, ignorant “I’m going to believe and don’t confuse me with the facts” dogmatism. God simply asks you to trust him enough to obey him. It doesn’t matter whether you think this is a great idea or a terrible idea. Trust God enough to obey, and you will taste and see that God is good. Things will work better. Your life will go better, because you will see that God will act in the ways he has promised on your behalf.
Did you know God wants you to be happy? Did you know God deeply desires to bless you? The Sermon on the Mount begins with the Beatitudes…Blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the meek, blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, blessed are the poor in spirit… Psalm 1 begins with “Blessed is the one who does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly, or stand in the way of sinners, or sit in the seat of mockers.”
The word “blessed” literally means “happy.” You can even find it translated that way in some versions of the Bible.
Ps 1:1 (NCV)
1Happy are those who don’t listen to the wicked, who don’t go where sinners go, who don’t do what evil people do.
If you struggle to trust God even a little bit, I encourage you to start here. What if you could bring yourself to act as if your greatest desire for your life (happiness), and God’s greatest desire for your life (happiness) were the same? What if you acted as if God wants you to be happy, wants what’s best for you, desires for you to be happy and healthy and whole, to enjoy your life, to prosper in your relationships, to live without fear and anxiety, to release your burdens of care and concern, to stop striving to get what you need and be able to simply trust God to provide it for you?
That is the life Jesus promised to all who trust in him.
Mt 11:30 (The Message)
30Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”
The life everybody wants – a life of freedom and lightness, is available as we keep company with Jesus, and experience him. As we experience him, we will increasingly KNOW him. In the coming weeks we will be looking at how to keep company with Jesus, so that we can be with him and experience him and therefore know him and learn from him how to live the life of blessing, freedom, and lightness that every one of us desires.
Ps 34:8 (NLT)
8Taste and see that the LORD is good. Oh, the joys of those who take refuge in him!
