Reflection: Knowing God Personally

My friend had been telling me why she didn’t believe in God. She had been raised an Anglican, attended Sunday school and sung in the children’s choir. She had studied the Prayer Book and catechism in preparation for confirmation. She still loved the language of the Prayer Book, even though she didn’t believe a word of it.

So what happened? Why had this caring, highly successful attorney become an atheist?

“Well,” she said, “I knew a lot about God, but I really never knew God. I knew the language and the ritual, but I never experienced the reality. I could recite the Apostles’ Creed from memory, but I didn’t have the foggiest notion how God made a difference in my life. Then one day as I was saying the Lord’s Prayer, I came to the conclusion no one was listening because no one was there. I just stopped believing in God.”

Sound familiar? Maybe you know people like my friend, people who grew up in the church but no longer believe in God, or if they do believe in God, it doesn’t seem to matter very much.

So often we in the church are accused of teaching "churchianity" instead of Christianity—teaching our children all sorts of doctrines and church practices without teaching them to know and love Jesus. But Christianity is nothing more—and nothing less—than a constant connection to Jesus: experiencing Jesus, committing your life to Jesus, following Jesus, being in relationship with Jesus. If Jesus isn’t at the centre of our life, everything else falls apart.

"And this is eternal life,” John 17:3 says, “that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”

To “know” God in this biblical sense is not primarily an act of the intellect; it is an act of the heart. It comes not by scientific study but through personal relationship. It is subjective rather than objective. It is to know God from the depths of our being rather than off the top of our head. Cardinal John Henry Newman put it succinctly in his motto: Cor ad cor loquitur—“Heart speaks to heart.”

So much of Christian education used to be a matter of memorizing the catechism, the creeds and the Prayer Book—as if knowing God could be attained by rote. The more we memorized, the more it was presumed we knew God.

The problem with this approach is that right answers about God are no substitute for a right relationship with God. “God so loved the world"…not to inform our minds but to transform our lives.

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