The Greatest of All Our Needs—to Know Him
"Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and yet you have not known Me...?"
—John 14:9
It is of the greatest importance for the Lord's children to recognize fully that, above all other things, His object is that they should know Him. This is the all-governing end of all His dealings with us. This is the greatest of all our needs.
Our minds are so often occupied with service and work; we think that doing things for the Lord is the chief object of life. We are concerned about our lifework, or ministry. We think of equipment for it in terms of study and knowledge of things. Soul-winning, or teaching believers, or setting people to work, are so much in the foreground. Bible study and knowledge of the Scriptures, with efficiency in the matter of leading in Christian service as the end in view, are the matters of pressing importance with all.
All well and good, for these are important matters; but, back of everything that the Lord is more concerned about our knowing Him than about anything else. It is very possible to have a wonderful grasp on the Scriptures, a comprehensive and intimate familiarity with doctrine; to stand for cardinal verities of the faith; to be an unceasing worker in Christian service; to have a great devotion of the salvation of men, and yet, alas, to have a very inadequate and limited personal knowledge of God within. So often the Lord has to take away our work that we may discover Him.
The ultimate value of everything is not the information which we give, not the amount of work that we do, not the measure of truth that we possess, but just the fact that we know the Lord in a deep and mighty way.
This is the one thing that will remain when all else passes. It is this that will make for the permanence of our ministry after we are gone. While we may help others in many ways and by many means so far as their earthly life is concerned, our real service to them is based upon our knowledge of the Lord.
We want instructions and commands, the Lord wants us to have a "mind." "Have this mind in you," (Phil 2:5) "We have the mind of Christ" (1 Cor 2:16). Christ has a consciousness, and by the Holy Spirit He would give and develop in us that consciousness. The inspired statement is that "His anointing teaches you concerning all things" (1 John 2:27). We are not servants, we are sons. Commands—as such—are for servants, and mind is for sons.
There is an appalling state of things amongst the Lord's people today. So many of them have their life almost entirely in that which is external to themselves—in their counsel and guidance, their sustenance and support, their guidance, their means of grace. Personal, inward, spiritual intelligence is a very rare thing. No wonder that the enemy has such a successful line in delusions, counterfeits, and false representations. Our greatest safeguard against such will be a deep knowledge of the Lord through discipline.
Immediately it is things that we reach out for: e.g., experiences, sensations, "proofs," evidences, manifestations, and so on, we become exposed in a perilous realm where Satan can give a false conversion, a false "baptism of the Spirit"(?), a false evidence and guidance such as is found in spiritualism.
To know the Lord in a real way means steadfastness when others are being carried away—steadfastness through times of fiery trial. Those who know the Lord do not put forth their own hand and try to bring things about. Such are full of love and patience, and do not lose their poise when everything seems to be going to pieces. Confidence is an essential and inevitable fruit of this knowledge, and in those who know Him there is a quiet restful strength which speaks of a great depth of life.
To close let me point out that in Christ "are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden" (Col 2:3), and the Lord's will for us is to come to an ever-growing realization and personal appreciation of Him in Whom all the fullness dwells.
The absence of this real knowledge of the Lord has proved to be the most tragic factor in the Church's history. Every fresh uprising of an abnormal condition has disclosed the appalling weakness amongst Christian people because of this lack. Waves of error; the swing of the pendulum to some fresh popular acceptance; a great war with its horrors and many-sided tests of faith; all these have swept away multitudes and left them in spiritual ruin.
These things are ever near at hand, and we have written this message to urge upon the Lord's people to have very definite dealings with Him so that He will take every measure with them that they might know Him.
"And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent."
—John 17:3"That I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, if, by any means, I may attain to the resurrection from the dead."
—Philippians 3:10-11