(…continued) Make sure you know God and that you know something about God so you don’t end up like Pete, throwing away your best hope for no good reason. We all have different priorities, of course, but one area that should be a priority for everyone, all the time, is getting to know Jesus in whatever way works for you. Find the ways you can get to know Him better.
There doesn’t need to be anything complicated about this. It can work in all the usual ways. The central and most basic way we keep in touch is the weekly worship service. That is where we start, and it is an essential part of one’s spiritual life.
However, Sunday worship by itself doesn’t give you enough of an opportunity to really get to know Jesus. The Sunday service is a time for everyone of all ages and types to gather, and that’s important. But with everyone there at once, the content of the service has to be quite general in an attempt to speak to all. We need more.
Most churches do offer several more opportunities. There are Bible studies, fellowship dinners, and service opportunities. We also get to know Jesus better by getting to know others who believe in Jesus, and, by serving together in His name. The goal is to get to know Jesus better. Find whatever way works for you, and make time for it.
One more thing. In the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew 6:6 Jesus says, “When you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your Father, who is unseen.” Go into your room, close the door, and pray. Getting to know Jesus also involves spending time with him alone. And when you spend your own personal time with Jesus, you can find something that speaks more specifically to you and your situation, and you can pray in your own words. You may already be reading your Bibles and having daily devotions and prayer; but if you aren’t, I encourage you to find some way, each day, to get to know Jesus better. This can be the most difficult part of our faith walk—we are busy, we forget, we get distracted, our phone rings or dings, etc.
One way is to simply continue reading these daily Emailmeditations. This is a little tool that can help you have a brief conversation with God each day.
I started doing these fifteen years ago to give people that opportunity. Throughout my ministry, my primary focus was always on preaching and teaching. Preaching is a given, and Sunday worship is the main place many people connect with Jesus. But we need more. That is where teaching comes in. I started by offering a weekly Bible Study, which was always well received. There was good attendance, some teaching by me, and the opportunity for the group to discuss and ask questions about what they were learning.
But things have changed since 1980 in my little church in North Dakota. Church there was at 9:00, then coffee, then Bible study until about 11:15. People were there anyway, stayed for Bible Study, and we had a pretty consistent crowd every week. Then I moved on to bigger churches with two services and no time for Sunday morning Bible Study. Along with that, schedules were getting busier, and midweek Bible Studies were not very well attended. People usually liked what I had to offer, but just had too many other things going on.
So, I decided to rework my format and put my teaching into these daily blog posts of about a thousand words (give or take a few). That way, people could read them whenever they had five or ten minutes (more time if you pause to ponder it, or, to watch the video I sometimes add). Each day, there’s a bit of teaching to give you some insights into the life of faith, three Bible verses (on the average), and a prayer. You hear from God in my teaching and from His Word, and then you say something to God in the prayer (and here you can add a prayer of your own). It offers the opportunity for a little conversation every day, to keep in touch. It is ‘a little pinch’ each day to remind you of God and the big, eternal picture. It is a little time ‘in your room’ with Jesus (Matthew 6:6), to get to know him better.
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I do not get to know God and then do His will. I get to know Him by doing His will.
–Philip Yancey
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Matthew 6:6 – (Jesus said), “When you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen.”
II Peter 1:2 — Grace and peace be yours in abundance through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.
Psalm 46:10 — Be still and know that I am God.
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An 800 year old prayer turned into a top 40 hit in 1972 (from a 2012 recording):
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