Late in his life, in one version of the story, the renowned Swiss theologian Karl Barth was asked by an interviewer, “Dr. Barth, in all your years as a theologian and biblical scholar, what is the most profound thought you have ever come across?”
Barth considered a moment, then replied, “Jesus loves me, this I know.”
Puzzled, the interviewer asked, “You mean that ‘Jesus loves me’ is the most profound thing you’ve ever come across?”
“No. This I know.”
That’s it; that nails it. The question was actually a rather silly one, but Barth took it seriously and gave it a better answer than it may have deserved. “This I know.”
Profound. But is it really? And if so, why?
Knowing and Knowing
Also late in life, the apostle John explained to his readers, “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.” (1John 5:13) And in John’s gospel, Jesus prays this: “Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” (John 17:3)
These are both foundational statements for Christian life and doctrine, and together they tell us that we can know that we have eternal life if we know God through Jesus Christ. Both the English word “know” and the Greek word ginosko which it translates are used to cover a range of meanings, including two distinct meanings in the verses just quoted. The first meaning, in 1John 5:13, is to perceive and understand some fact or truth intellectually—as the dictionary puts it, to “grasp in the mind with clarity or certainty.” In this sense we know that ewes give birth to lambs and we can know that we have eternal life. The second meaning is to know some person or persons through relationship or acquaintance. In this sense we know our family members and, John 17:3 says, we can know God. The French language makes this distinction in the two verbs savoir and connaître. The distinction is important because there is a fundamental difference between knowing a fact or a skill and knowing a person. Human beings are persons—self-aware, intelligent, morally responsible beings—by virtue of having been created in the image of God (Gen.1:26-27). Being persons is the one thing we have in common with God. For our purposes here, the important thing to grasp in our mind is that, according to the Bible, we can know a priceless truth through knowing a priceless Person.
Basically it’s as simple as that, but the ramifications are complicated. I would like to loosen as many knots as possible.
For as long as human history has been recorded—for more than three thousand years—people have wondered and speculated about this question of knowledge. How do we gain knowledge? How do we evaluate what we learn? Can we even know whether what we think we know is really true? (It gets complicated quickly, you see.) A field of study has grown up around questions like these, a branch of philosophy called epistemology, generating countless books, lectures, seminars and arguments. What we are concerned with now is that branch of epistemology dealing specifically with the question of knowing God. Here too the books and arguments are beyond counting or reading; a good place to start, though, would be Knowing God by J.I. Packer.
Overcoming the Sin Gap
“Knowing God” is an extremely challenging assignment. Here’s why. God is an infinite, eternal, all-powerful Being, spiritual and not physical—which means that while his reality transcends ours (is greater than ours), he remains invisible to our senses even though he is everywhere present. He is holy, utterly free of any moral imperfection. We, on the (distant) other hand, are finite, bound to our physical bodies, and born into sin, ensnared by sin, deluded by sin, and addicted to sin. Sin essentially is our natural attitude toward God: our contempt for him (even to the point of denying his existence), our desire to live independently of him, and our conceit that we are morally superior to him. When we understand what sin is, it’s easy to understand why, according to the Bible, sin separates us from God. It does so by its very nature. That being the case, however, how can we overcome sin and get to know this transcendent, holy God? The short answer is, we can’t. No one but God alone has ever had the ability to overcome our sin and close the gap that it has caused between us. But, again according to the Bible, the only way he could do that was to take on human form—Jesus Christ—and sacrifice himself in our place, thus accomplishing “the great exchange”: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2Cor.5:21) “For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.” (1Peter 3:18)
But why would God go to such lengths and pay such a price to reconcile people who, until he reaches in and changes our heart, don’t even want to be reconciled, who are spitting at him the whole time? Because, unlike us, God is gracious. He loves the unlovely. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16) “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Rom.5:8) The more we consider these things, the better we can understand what grace means.
What Jesus has done and is still doing is the culmination of God’s long plan of salvation, of which the whole Bible is the record. It’s a marathon, covering the entire history of the human race. It’s also a process through which God has gradually revealed himself to us, through his dealings with Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham, Moses, the prophets and the apostles (keeping the list short), and supremely in Jesus himself, the Son of God.
So God has—graciously—enabled us to know him. In doing so, he has availed himself of all the ways in which he has enabled us to know anything. Which brings us back to epistemology, the study of human knowing.
The Four Ways of Knowing
Essentially there are four ways in which we gain knowledge. Two of them I can do by myself, and for the other two I need input from others. These four are sensory experience, reasoning, authoritative testimony, and divine revelation. Before looking into these, however, we must consider an alternative which would cancel them all. This is radical skepticism, the belief that all our supposed knowledge is illusory or uncertain. Such skepticism has been around since the ancient Greeks and is currently alive in the philosophical movement called Postmodernism, but it has never gained much traction, probably because it goes against both common experience and common sense. They may tell us we can’t know for sure that apples grow on trees or that 2+3 = 5, but few people buy it.
So on to the four ways by which we can gain real knowledge. The first two, sensory experience and reasoning, would work for me even if, like Robinson Crusoe and, more recently, Tom Hanks, I was stranded on a desert island. Through my physical senses I could take in my surroundings and understand my plight. I could explore the island and find out what resources were available for my survival. In that way I could learn a great deal. At the same time, I would also be employing the second way of gaining knowledge; I would be reasoning (furiously, in such a case), thinking things through. And if, as Crusoe did, I came across a human footprint I was sure I hadn’t made, I would learn, by reasoning, a new and very consequential fact.
We reason about things in two main ways, deduction and induction. In deduction we work from general information we already possess, putting two or more pieces of information together in order to draw a specific conclusion—new knowledge. Robinson Crusoe knew that only a human foot makes that impression in the sand, and he knew it wasn’t his foot that did it, and so he realized he wasn’t alone. In the Conan Doyle story “Silver Blaze,” Sherlock Holmes knew that the dog guarding the stable would have barked if a stranger approached in the night, and he knew that the dog didn’t bark when the prize racehorse was taken from the stable, and so he deduced—from “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time”—that the horse thief was well known to the dog.
Whereas deduction goes from general to specific knowledge, induction goes the other way, compiling specific information in a systematic way in order to derive a general conclusion. This is the primary method of empirical science. Patiently and systematically, the astronomer Edwin Hubble observed and measured the velocities at which distant galaxies are receding from one another. From all this gathered information he concluded momentously that the whole universe is expanding.
Historically, philosophers have tended to divide themselves between empiricism and rationalism—that is, between those who think sensory experience is our primary source of knowledge and those who think our rational processes are primary. The seventeenth century French philosopher Rene Descartes famously defined the rationalist position when, having set himself to doubt everything he found doubtful, he concluded that the evidence of his senses might possibly be illusory, but he could not doubt that he was actually thinking about these things, and that proved to his own satisfaction that he, at least, existed: Cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” A few decades later, though, John Locke, in his almost-as-famous Essay Concerning Human Understanding, argued that sensory experience is the primary and most essential source of knowledge. Modern science combines both ways of knowing, and biblical teaching, as we will see, also regards both as essential sources of knowledge. The debate over their primacy, while historically important, is ultimately a tempest in a teapot.
Then we come to the third and fourth sources of human knowledge, where the knowledge comes to us from minds beyond our own: authoritative testimony and divine revelation. Testimony is one of those things we tend to take for granted without realizing how much we rely on it. How do you know that George Washington was the first president of the United States? Or that Beijing is the capital of China? Or that the earth orbits the sun and not the other way around? These and innumerable other things we know—or at least we assume them to be accurate knowledge—because somebody (a parent, a teacher, a writer, etc.) told us it was so, and we thought we had good reason to believe them, to consider their word authoritative—that is, informed, reliable, true, right. Much of our ongoing learning process consists in continually re-evaluating our store of testimonial knowledge in the light of new knowledge we are gaining (much of this also being testimonial). As a child you form, in conspiracy with your peers, certain ideas about how parents should treat their children. When you marry and are expecting your first baby, you read some books and talk with friends who have young children, and this leads you to re-evaluate your ideas about parenting. A few years and two or three children later, you are re-evaluating once again. Knowledge isn’t gained easily, but accurate knowledge is better than misinformation or ignorance.
The most familiar instance of testimony being heard and evaluated is courtroom procedure. Eyewitness testimony is considered the most reliable; secondhand or “hearsay” testimony is generally excluded. Even eyewitness testimony has to be evaluated—seven different witnesses, as they say, see seven different crimes. Witnesses can be mistaken, impassioned, scared, suborned, or just dishonest. And yet their testimony, sifted and checked as carefully as possible, is the surest way (along with physical evidence) to find out what really happened.
Finally, we can gain knowledge through divine revelation—particularly, of course, knowledge about God. There are many who trust knowledge gained through their senses, their reasoning, and testimony from other people, but who think divine revelation is sheer fantasy. That’s regrettable, because divine revelation—both through the Bible and directly from his Spirit to our spirit—is the source of the surest knowledge we can have about the ultimate issues of human life: about our Creator, our Redeemer, and our eternal destiny. In order to receive this knowledge we need to trust its Source, God himself. That means taking the Bible seriously, yes, but through reading and studying the Bible we discover that God has, in fact, revealed himself to us in all four ways in which we are capable of gaining knowledge.
God and Our Senses
First, he has revealed himself to our physical senses in the created world he has given us to live in. As the psalmist sings,
The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge.
There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard.
Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.
(Psalm 19:1-4)
It is the sheer magnitude and unapproachable distances of the starry realm, evident to ancient observers and all the more to modern astronomers, which impress upon us the incalculable power and majesty of their Creator. If we deny that such immense and varied splendor even had a Creator, we are just suppressing evidence and the conclusion to which it points: “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” (Rom.1:18-20) If you don’t like thinking about your wickedness and God’s wrath, you can either repent (in gratitude for God’s mercy through Jesus Christ) or reject the whole idea (that is, go on suppressing). What you can’t do is follow the judge’s impossible instruction to the jurors, to put out of their minds what they just heard.
Not only the heavens but the earth itself speaks of its Creator. Did all this astonishing beauty just happen to happen? Is it merely by coincidence that we are able to appreciate such beauty? (The more you think about these things, the more of these coincidences you will notice.) We recognize the artist’s hand in a painting by Rembrandt or Renoir; what about Yosemite and Victoria Falls? “Formed by purely natural processes,” indeed, in one case by the painter’s brush strokes, in the other by God’s geology. “But we know the human artists or at least know about them.” Certainly. As for God, besides the previous quote the apostle Paul also observed that God “has not left himself without testimony: He has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons; he provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy.” (Acts 14:17)
God and Our Mind
Second, God reveals himself to our mind, as we use the ability he has given us to reason and follow logic where it leads. Jesus, God’s supreme self-revelation, is called the divine Logos (John 1:1,14), meaning God’s rational expression of himself to our rational minds. Our word “logic” stems from logos. In all his teaching, Jesus addresses our mind much more than our emotions. Of course we respond emotionally to what he has done for us, but the parables make us think. “Be transformed,” Paul exhorts us, “by the renewing of your mind.” (Rom.12:2) Only a fool (the Hebrew word nabal implies moral corruption that disturbs mental balance) thinks there is no God (Ps.14:1).
Modern science, as already noted, combines knowledge derived both from our senses and our reasoning. Ever since the Victorian period, and especially since Darwin, a widely accepted view has been that the more knowledge we get of the natural world through science, the less room is left for God. He has, it is said, become superfluous, obsolete and implausible. During the last half century, however, the discoveries of science (particularly molecular biochemistry coupled with mathematical probability and information theory) about the biological cell have made God not only plausible but, increasingly, unavoidable. The cell, we now know, is primarily a device which stores, copies, processes, and reproduces information. The heart of this extremely complex operation, without which life would be impossible, is the celebrated nucleic acid known, in shorthand, as DNA. In every one of the approximately 50 trillion cells in your body, DNA is constantly processing information in the same way your laptop computer processes it, but much more information, much faster and more efficiently. There is now broad agreement among scientists (though for many this comes hard) that random chance alone could not have originated the first biological life—the odds are far too steeply against it. Modern science knows of only one source of this kind of information and, all the more, this abundance of information: intelligence. (On this subject see, especially, Stephen Meyer’s magisterial explanation in Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design [2009].) The most complex, highly organized things we know of are at the start of the chain of life (the biological cell) and at its apex (the human brain). There is intelligence behind all this, immense intelligence—in fact, God’s supreme intelligence, communicating with our created intelligence.
God and Authoritative Testimony
Third, God has revealed himself to us through authoritative testimony, in the Bible. No one denies that the Bible is full of testimony, but is it authoritative? How can we evaluate its authority? In what sense, if at all, is it “the word of God”?
To begin with, we can know with certainty that this book, among all human writings, is absolutely unique, a world-historical phenomenon. For that reason alone it merits our scrutiny.
The Bible is divided into the Old Testament, covering everything from the creation of the universe down to the time just before Jesus was born, and the New Testament, covering everything that has happened since then and will happen in the future. “Covering” here means revealing the spiritual meaning. Although the Bible contains true history, its purpose is not to survey all of human history but to reveal the true meaning of that history.
It was written over a period of some fifteen hundred years, from around 1450 B.C. to 90 A.D., by about forty different people, including kings, priests, poets, prophets, a shepherd, a physician, a tax collector, a missionary, and some commercial fishermen. It has a wide variety of literary forms—history, law, genealogy, prophecy, proverb, lyric, correspondence, parable, apocalyptic, and more. Its cultural settings range from tribal to theocratic to nationalistic to cosmopolitan. And yet, even with all this breadth and diversity, it is definitely one book. Anyone who is willing to spend the time and effort to read it thoughtfully will discover this. Where you might expect to find a mishmash of conflicting views, you find a symphony of concurrence; and this impression of deep inner harmony grows stronger the more deeply you delve into it. What the Bible teaches about God and humanity, religion and ethics, history and destiny, forms a clearly definable body of consistent, coherent information. As Bible scholar R.A. Torrey explains, its unity is both profound and organic:
It is not a superficial unity, but a profound unity. On the surface, we often find apparent discrepancy and disagreement, but, as we study, the apparent discrepancy and disagreement disappear, and the deep underlying unity appears. The more deeply we study, the more complete do we find the unity to be. The unity is also an organic one—that is, it is not the unity of a dead thing, like a stone, but of a living thing, like a plant. In the early books of the Bible we have the germinant thought; as we go on we have the plant, and further on the bud, and then the blossom, and then the ripened fruit. In Revelation we find the ripened fruit of Genesis.
A skeptic might think that this unity is something that believers have found because they wanted to find it. The truth is, though, that millions of believers (like myself) came to the Bible as skeptics and then found themselves slowly but surely convinced. It is a supremely self-authenticating book.
The Bible possesses this organic unity because its primary author is God himself, conveying his truth to us through his chosen human authors. It focuses constantly on the stream of salvation history that flows through the center of human history. Its first sentence reports the act of creation, and its final chapters describe the consummation of history at the second coming of Christ. Its subject matter is nothing less than cosmic and human history from A to Z, and its central figure is Jesus himself, who says, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.” (Rev.22:13) In the Old Testament the way is prepared for the coming of the Messiah, in the Gospels he is on center stage, and the rest of the New Testament explains the significance of his coming.
The Gospel writers each gave an account of what seemed to them the main events in the earthly life and ministry of Jesus. Two of them, Matthew and John, were among the twelve disciples and thus were eyewitnesses. Mark was a younger associate of another eyewitness, Peter. Luke, a companion of Paul and a research historian (of very high caliber), relied on the eyewitness accounts of others, as the preface to his Gospel indicates.
Eyewitness testimony is authoritative when it is genuine and honest, and the New Testament writers often remind us of this. Peter says with characteristic bluntness, “We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.” (2Peter 1:16) These men spent three years in constant, intimate companionship with Jesus. They heard a lot of his musings and asides along with the more formal teaching that he gave them in private, in addition to his public teachings. As John says in the last verse of his Gospel, they saw many more of his acts than they were able to record—acts of kindness and compassion, miracles of healing and deliverance. What we get in the Gospels is a selection and distillation, a sort of “best of”—except that with Jesus, everything was the best. What we don’t get is “cleverly invented stories.” Keep in mind, we are not dealing with hoaxers or lunatics but with sober men who worked with their hands to support their families. When threatened with death on account of their testimony about Jesus, they would not recant. As eyewitness evidence, the Gospels are as good as it gets. (For much more on this, see Richard Bauckham’s groundbreaking book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony [2006]).
The Bible is also the most personal book ever written. It speaks to each of us about our life as we experience it, more profoundly, poignantly, intimately, and accurately than any other book. It is unique in every way—a word often used loosely but in this case properly applied. It is far and away the most copied, printed, translated, distributed, read, quoted, discussed, and researched book in history. Its literary and cultural influence is vast beyond measure; no one who neglects it can have a sound understanding of human history since the time of Christ.
The Bible, then, is in its own category, unrivalled in its influence. Its testimony about Jesus comes to us with trustworthy authority. From beginning to end, in fact, the Bible claims an ultimate authority: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness ....” (2Tim.3:16) “Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” (2Peter 1:20-21) “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.” (Mark 13:31) The Bible claims to be “the word of God” and therefore to speak with absolute authority; whether or not to accept this authority, however, is something each of us has to decide for himself or herself. It’s a matter between each person and God, a matter of conscience and relationship (“knowing God”). Unless you read the Bible yourself, however, this most consequential of all decisions will be made in ignorance and by default, possibly in dependence on the opinions of some whose authority on the question is another question. And since the Bible’s central figure is Jesus, the place to start is the Gospels.
Direct Revelation
Fourth and finally, we can gain knowledge of God through direct revelation from his Spirit to our spirit. After we have trusted in Christ for our salvation, “The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.” (Rom.8:16) In general, this kind of direct revelation is known as mysticism. Mysticism is one of those things, like hallucinogenic drugs, that are usually prized by those who have experienced them without apparent harm and shunned by those who haven’t. There is plenty of evidence that hallucinogens can harm us mentally, especially over time. Mysticism is not dan-gerous in the same way, but like drugs it is subject to fakery and abuse, especially from phony gurus of every religious pretense who prey on the gullible and vulnerable. There is probably no area beyond the party scene and the used car lot where discernment is more needed. But the real thing, the Holy Spirit revealing himself in all his glory and love and passionate purpose, is more precious than gold and sweeter than honey (see Ps.19:10). It isn’t easy or safe, though; it’s dangerous in another way. It can be an ordeal—check out Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Hosea—and it may change your life in ways you otherwise might not have chosen. Left to his own devices, Peter would probably have remained a commercial fisherman, but after Pentecost (Acts 2) he never looked back. Then there is Saul of Tarsus, converted through a sunburst of direct revelation from an embittered, violent Pharisee into the man who gave up everything for the sake of knowing Jesus, counted what he had lost as garbage, and, in chains, wrote that joyous, love-soaked letter to the Philippians.
The direct revelation of God’s Spirit to our spirit covers a wide experiential range, from the subtle to the overwhelming. It can be so subtle that we aren’t even sure it’s happening. Was that God who just nudged me, reminded me, or warmed my heart? The best way to answer this is to consider whether the nudge is toward helping or encouraging or otherwise benefitting other people. If so, figure it was God; if not, it was probably your own appetite or something worse. At the other end of the spectrum is the overwhelming. The Bible records a number of such experiences, after which the recipient says things like this: “And there, where they [the Jewish exiles in Babylon] were living, I sat among them for seven days—overwhelmed.” (Ezek.3:15) “I had no strength left, my face turned deathly pale and I was helpless.” (Dan.10:8) “When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead.” (Rev.1:17) The attempts of these people to describe the visions or theophanies almost always come across as weird and bizarre, but we should cut them some slack: They are trying to describe the indescribable.
Many Christians since Bible times have also recorded a great variety of mystical experiences. Such accounts, by their very nature, cannot be verified except through the person’s subsequent behavior. Again, if it was the God of the Bible revealing himself, the behavior will be in the direction of humility and love, or what Paul unpacks as “the fruit of the Spirit”: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentle-ness and self-control.” (Gal.5:22-23)
One of the most notable of these accounts comes from the seventeenth century French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher of religion, Blaise Pascal. Pascal was a child prodigy, and in adulthood his genius illuminated every subject to which he turned his mind. At sixteen he wrote a treatise on projective geometry, and later he laid the mathematical foundations of modern probability theory. Today he is most famous for his Pensées (“Thoughts”), which are really his notes for a planned book explaining why Christian belief makes good philosophical sense. He died—just short of his fortieth birthday—before he could write the book, but even in their preliminary form the Pensées have deeply impressed readers in every subsequent generation who take an interest in what it means to be a human being in a vast, mysterious and uncaring universe.
In 1654, two weeks after surviving an accident in which his carriage nearly plunged off a bridge into the Seine river, Pascal had a visionary experience with God. He told no one about the experience but recorded it in a note which he sewed into the lining of his coat, near his heart. After his death in 1662 the note was discovered by one of his servants. It is known as “Pascal’s Memorial”:
The year of grace 1654,
from about half past ten in the evening until about half past midnight.
FIRE.
God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,
not of the philosophers and scholars.
Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.
God of Jesus Christ.
“My God and your God.”
“Your God will be my God.”
The world forgotten, and everything except God.
He is only found by the ways taught in the Gospel.
Grandeur of the human soul.
“Righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you.”
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy. . . .
“This is eternal life, that they know you, the one true God, and the one that you sent.”
Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ.
I abandoned him, shunned him, denied him, crucified him.
Let me never be separated from him!
He is only kept securely by the ways taught in the Gospel.
Renunciation, total and sweet.
Complete submission to Jesus Christ and to my director.
Eternal joy for a day’s effort on the earth.
May I not forget your words. Amen.
One thing to be sure of about such experiences is that each one is unique, just as each person’s relationship with God is unique. They can be remembered, even treasured, but not reproduced. And for our spiritual growth, the more important thing is our day-to-day, moment-by-moment awareness of God’s presence—Immanuel (“God with us”), present through his Holy Spirit.
Conclusion
Scripture assures us that we can know that we have eternal life if we know God through Jesus Christ. God has revealed himself to us and enabled us to know him through every way in which we are capable of gaining knowledge. But none of this happens automatically. We need to trust Jesus (“believe”), ask, receive, and follow (obey). “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.” (Matt.7:7-8) “Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.” (John 1:12) Getting to know God, better and better throughout our life, isn’t easy. God is holy and he is making us holy, a process the Bible likens to precious metals being refined by fire. The New Testament continually tells us to make every effort, to run the race, to deny and discipline ourselves, to fight the good fight (and turn the other cheek), to stand firm, to count the cost, to take up our cross—meaning to embrace the death of our old, independent life. “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling ....” (Php.2:12)
So, is getting to know God worth it? Oh yes.
No comments:
Post a Comment