“I want to know you/I want to hear your voice/I want to know you more….”
I am not sure why, but during the singing time in church today, this phase from a familiar song jolted me.
It was a song that I must have sung a 100 times before. But for some reason this morning, something about those words stopped me in my tracks.
“I want to know you more…”
Really? I mean, do we really?
By definition, to know someone more is to find out something about the person that we didn’t know before. Perhaps even to have a long held impression about the person shattered.
That’s what happens when you get to know someone more.
But it seems that so often, when I hear people talk about their experience of “knowing God more”, it is little more than confirming what they already “knew” about God.
It’s almost like we start out with this mental image of whom God is “supposed to be”, and when we come across an experience that happen to confirm that image, we talk about it, and others join in, “praising God”.
I have been part of those “sharing of testimonies” countless times. Often I wonder…are we really “praising God”, or are we simply “congratulating” ourselves for “being right” about God?
What happens to all those experiences that do not “jive” with who we think God is supposed to be and how He is supposed to act? Why don’t we talk about those more?
In fact, I have observed that when we come across an experience of that sort, we often do the worst possible thing: We take that experience , we push it down, we twist it around, we “shoehorn” it into this box we have in our minds labelled: ”This is who God is”.
Do we really what to know God more?
Can we handle being wrong, terribly wrong, fundamentally wrong about God, about who He is, what He wants, how He works, what He does?
It is quite clear that in the biblical story, that’s part and parcel of being “God’s people”…God’s people in the Bible are often those who are most “wrong” about God. And God, for thousands of years have had to say “That is NOT who I am…”
For some reason, the church today seems to be quite convinced that God doesn’t have to do that anymore…”We’ve got you figured out…thank you very much.”
Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why God has always had a “thing” against people creating and worshiping man made images. Because once you create an “image”, you are saying: “Here, we’ve figured it out: THIS is what God looks like…”
The Bible says we were created in God’s image…I wonder if in the way we approach Christianity, the opposite is true, that we, in our own minds, have “created God in our image”
It seems to me, biblically, that a central part of the journey of faith is to be proven “wrong” about God. Yet today we seem to be bent on proving to others how “right” we are about Him.
Meanwhile, we sing “I want to know you/I want to hear your voice/I want to know you more…”
Do we really?
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