“Knowing” God, Like “Knowing” ANY Person, Means Knowing Them From the INSIDE!
“Knowing” God, Like “Knowing” ANY Person, Means Knowing Them From the INSIDE!
Our ability to understand or wrap our minds around another person depends upon our ability to fit what goes on inside of their thoughts, their decision-making process, and their emotions into our thoughts, our way of making decisions, and our emotions. If that person “runs deeper” than we do, then we simply CANNOT wrap our mind around them, any more than you can fit ten gallons of water into a five-gallon bucket! But the more that God stretches us in His direction, the more of that “ten-gallon person” you will be able to understand. The same holds true with thinking that you can know Jesus merely by reading and agreeing with all of the literature about Him that God gave to us. We cannot help but fill those inspired words that we read with OUR experience of them. When, for example, Jesus told His disciples to, “Love one another as I have loved you,” we can examine those Gospels to search for all the clues that might reveal how He had demonstrated that word “love;” but that is only an attempt to look at that word “love” from the OUTSIDE. We can only know what He meant by that “love” from the INSIDE to the degree that the “love” that we are able to give to and receive from others matches what HE felt and extended to them. Using the same word as “love” or “patience” or “good will” that someone else uses does not mean that our version of the reality underlying those words describes the same REALITIES that they are describing! Jesus’s disciples spent three years day and night with Him, and yet those Gospels show time and again that they were not able to adequately receive what He was giving to them all during that period. They continued to bicker and compete with one another all along. They wanted to use the degree of power that He had authorized them to used for HIS purposes to call down divine lightening upon those who insulted Him (and indirectly themselves): ““Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven and consume them, just like Elijah did?” (Luke 9:54).
They did not seem to begin “knowing” Jesus from the INSIDE and in the depth of what He was teaching until AFTER they had been properly prepared inwardly by going through what they did in watching, enduring, and failing in the way they did during His rejection and horrible crucifixion, followed by having the very same Spirit that He had received in His baptism come upon them and INTO them in their Pentecostal experience. Those who became Christians after them could not have experienced what they had with regard to His suffering (since they were not there), but they DID share in that same internal supernatural version of the promised Pentecostal “falling” and “filling.” after having received the preaching that had both brought them low and given them the way to find His forgiveness!
The depth of our personal preparation seems to directly correlate to the ability to receive His personal “filling.” “The water can only be filled up to the level that the dirt is dug out,” as it were, no?
One lack of personal preparation can occur when God’s Spirit does not consider that we have let Him bring us into what HE decides is that “sorrow of God”:
“I rejoice, not that you were made sorry, but that your sorrow led to repentance. For you were made sorry in a godly manner, that you might suffer loss from us in nothing. For godly sorrow produces repentance [leading] to salvation” (2 Corinthians 7:8-10; see also Acts 2:37-39).
But another lack of personal preparation so frequently occurs in our days occurs because the Gospel given to people who have sincerely surrendered themselves to Jesus does not include the wonderful promise that what happened to those first disciples was intended to happen to EVERYONE whose “godly sorrow” and whose new “faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.” How often have you heard the promise being proclaimed that what God did in Acts 2, 8, 9, 10 and 19 is what He has promised for ALL who are willing to receive His promise. So many earnest followers of Jesus have been told that they have ALREADY “received His Holy Spirit” as long as they had “accepted Christ as Lord and Savior.” And that means that they are not SUPPOSED to want or ask to “‘receive His Holy Spirit,” which in turn leads to them feel that if they DO ask for that promised gift then it means that they have only been some kind of “second class citizen” until now.
But by the Day of Pentecost, had not those 120 disciples of Jesus already believed and confessed that Jesus was the Christ, who was crucified to atone for their sins, and raised for our justification? Had not those baptized Samaritan converts from Philip’s anointed ministry already believed and confessed that Jesus was the Christ, who was crucified to atone for their sins, and raised for our justification? (Acts 8). And was that not also the same for those “disciples” of Jesus whom Paul asked “DID you receive the Spirit when you believed?” If they were not “second-class citizens” and were “true believers,” but had not yet received His Holy Spirit, why should you believe anyone who tells you that all who “believe in Jesus” have already experientially received the Pentecostal outpouring which they had received AFTER having become apostolically converted and baptized?
They were convinced that they had truly EXPERIENCED His “falling” and “filling” by the EVENT that was recorded. If you are already convinced by an EVENT that He caused you to receive, and which you can remember as well as they can, then you will not need to pay any attention to what I have written. People who FEEL “full” are not readily convincible by any human that they are actually hungry.
But if these passages DO awaken any hunger within you – and if read all that Jesus promised WHAT the coming of His Spirit would be like (see examples below), and if you believe (like I came to understand about me) that you cannot use the same language that is in those passages to honestly describe what He has done within you yet: then please DO listen to what I have written. God has never intended that His church and members were doomed to becoming less than what is described within the Book of Acts (AND in the continuing several centuries)! If we seek Him with all of our hears then He has PROMISED to let us find Him (Jeremiah 29:12-13).
A FEW EXPERIENCE-ORIENTED PASSAGES:
“In the last day, that great [day] of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, ‘If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.’ (But this spoke he of the Spirit, which they that believe on him should receive, for the Holy Ghost was not yet given; because Jesus was not yet glorified.)” (John 7:37-39). [Can you not see how bodily and experiential this language of Jesus is?! It was not proper to translate that word “belly (Greek: “koilia”/”κοιλια”) as “heart” or “innermost being” (as numerous translations do), because those terms are HIGHLY abstract, and are not physically and experiential enough to describe what He personally went through at His baptism, and the language used to describe His experiential filling events in the Book of Acts. If you have been told that you have “already received” His Pentecostal Spirit, why should YOUR receiving of His Holy Spirit have been any less momentous and deeply remembered as all of what He did in them?!]
“Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again; but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never thirst—ever; but the water that I will give him will become IN HIM a well of water springing up to eternal life” (John 4:13-14).
When I read passages like this back in the spring of 1972, I realized that I could not honestly use language like in these two (and other) passages to described what my relationship with God was like up to then, and finally I just yielded to what I still needed, began to seek Him passionately, and by that December, HE WAS FAITHFUL!!!
The coming of His Holy Spirit into them was SO full of Spirit-caused consequences that they were accused by the cynical observers of being “full of new wine” (Acts 2:13). Maybe something like THAT was what PAUL described as “righteousness, peace, and JOY in the Holy Spirit!, no? (Romans 14:17).
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