Knowing Christ (Part 2)

As John Wesley discovered [see Part One], there is a huge difference between knowing about Christ and knowing Christ savingly, personally, and intimately. Many in the crowds who listened to Jesus teach and witnessed his miracles, never entered into a saving relation with him. It would appear that the majority of the scribes and the Pharisees who listened to Christ expound the Scriptures in their own synagogues and Temple, never knew this Teacher as Lord and Savior. They who boasted in their knowledge of God's Word, and believed such intellectual knowledge was the equivalent of spiritual life, would eventually kill the Lord of glory: "You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life."²⁵ Unfortunately, these Bible scholars of Jesus' day only knew God in the third person, which has proved to be a snare to many.

Discerning this peril of only knowing God in the "third person," a peril which afflicts countless students of the Bible and theology, Dennis Kinlaw, former president of Asbury College, warns Bible students to be vigilant lest they fall into this subtle trap. He writes, "Theol-ogy books are always written in the third person. They present God as an object to be studied, and one rarely hears of anyone being converted while reading a theology book. The only way a person can ever be converted is if God is understood not in the third person but in the first person. He must become the subject and we must become the object. Unfortunately, most of Christianity is a massive effort to keep God in the third person. But there is no salvation until he is the first person and we deal with him face-to-face."²⁶ Dr. Kinlaw is not demeaning theologians or the study of theology; he himself is a theologian with a Ph.D. What he is decrying is what has become a plague among intellectualized Christianity: making Christ only an object to be studied without knowing him personally as Lord and Savior.

Esteemed evangelical theologian J. I. Packer has repeatedly warned his generation against the same danger—the danger of knowing about God/Christ without knowing him personally, savingly, and intimately. I think it worthwhile to quote him at length on this matter because he says it so well. 

. . . one can know a great deal about God without much knowledge of Him. I am sure that many of us have never really grasped this. We find in ourselves a deep interest in theology (which is, of course, a most fascinating and intriguing subject—in the seventeenth century it was every gentleman's hobby). We read books of theological exposition and apologetics. We dip into Christian history, and study the Christian creed. We learn to find our way around in the Scriptures. Others appreciate our interest in these things, and we find ourselves asked to give our opinion in public on this or that Christian question, to lead study groups, to give papers, to write articles, and generally to accept responsibility, informal if not formal, for acting as teachers and arbiters of orthodoxy in our own Christian circle. Our friends tell us how much they value our contribution, and this spurs us to further explorations of God's truth, so that we may be equal to the demands made upon us. All very fine—yet interest in theology, and knowledge about God, and the capacity to think clearly and talk well on Christian themes, is not at all the same thing as knowing Him. We may know as much about God as Calvin knew—indeed, if we study his works diligently, sooner or later we shall—and yet all the time (unlike Calvin, may I say) we may hardly know God at all.²⁷ 

The fact is, one cannot cultivate and express a passionate love for Christ without knowing Christ, and to know Christ is to experience Christ in our hearts, as John Wesley discovered so vividly. In addressing this issue, Oxford University professor and author Alister McGrath recalls a conversation he had with a former archbishop of Canterbury. "I vividly remember a conversation some years ago with Donald Coggan, a former archbishop of Canterbury. We were discussing some of the challenges to theological education, and had ended by sharing our concerns over people who left theological education knowing a lot more about God but seemingly loving God rather less than when they came in. Coggan turned to me sadly and remarked: 'The journey from head to heart is one of the longest and most difficult that we know.' "²⁸ Such a journey is only possible by a sincere seeker after God, inviting Christ to take full possession of one's heart.

This was a prayer burden the apostle Paul carried for the Ephesian Church. His prayer for them was "that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith."²⁹ He was concerned in this particular petition of his prayer about two things: that the Ephesians have more than a head knowledge of Christ—"that Christ may dwell in your hearts"; and secondly, that Christ would make his home in their hearts—"that Christ may dwell in your hearts." What many find here to be strange language, written to people who are supposed to be Christians, upon a closer examination we may well see why the apostle prays as he does. John Stott shares why he thinks this is so and deserves to be quoted in full. 

Some are puzzled by this first petition when they remember that Paul is praying for Christians. 'Surely', they say, 'Christ dwells by his Spirit within every believer? So how can Paul ask here that Christ may dwell in their hearts? Was Christ not already within them?'. To these questions we begin by replying that indeed every Christian is indwelt by Christ and is the temple of the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless as Charles Hodge rightly comments, 'The indwelling of Christ is a thing of degrees.' So also is the inward strengthening of the Holy Spirit . . . .

There are two similar Greek verbs, paroikeo and katoikeo. The former is the weaker. It means to 'inhabit (a place) as a stranger', to live in fact as a paroikos, the very word Paul has used in 2:19 for an alien who is living away from his home. Katoikeo, on the other hand, means to settle down somewhere. It refers to a permanent as opposed to a temporary abode, and is used metaphorically both for the fullness of the Godhead abiding in Christ and for Christ's abiding in the believer's heart (here in verse 17).³⁰ 

As an apostle, evangelist, and teacher, Paul was not content with merely a cerebral Christianity. He knew Christ personally and experientially and desired the same for all to whom he ministered. 

Knowing Christ Increasingly

In keeping with our theme on cultivating and expressing a passionate love for Christ, we are presently examining how this can be advanced under the sub-subject of "Knowing Christ." We have argued from the Scriptures that it is possible to know Christ, that God desires that we know Christ as Lord and Savior, and furthermore, we have seen that there is a huge difference between knowing about Christ and knowing Christ. Now I want to examine how a disciple of the Lord Jesus can know and experience him in a fuller way—increasingly—and how this contributes toward cultivating a passionate love for Christ. I want to turn to the apostle Paul and Philippians 3 in particular.

Thirty years after Paul's encounter with the Lord Jesus on the Damascus Road, he is sitting in a Roman prison dictating a letter to the Philippian Christians. By now a seasoned veteran of the Cross, his love for Christ is not only undiminished, it is thriving. However, he longs to know Christ in a greater dimension. Reflecting on his fleshly, human credentials before he came to faith in Christ—circumcised according to the standards of Jewish law; a member of the elite tribe of Benjamin; in language, lifestyle, and attitudes a Hebrew of Hebrews; a devout Pharisee regarding the law; a zealous persecutor of the church of Christ; and having lived a blameless life according to Jewish law³¹—Paul considers all of this "gain"—as "rubbish" in comparison to knowing Christ. He writes, "But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord."³² A few verses later in the same paragraph, he once again reiterates his insatiable desire to obtain a deeper understanding of Christ: "that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead."³³

Here is the church's foremost apostle, apologist, and evangelist confessing to his one paramount driving desire: "I want to  know Christ." This is certainly a paradox. Paul "knew" Christ and yet he says, I'm not content with the degree to which I know Christ; I want to know him far better. The aspiration to know the Lord Jesus Christ personally and increasingly is a key ingredient in cultivating and expressing a passionate love for him.

In writing on the subject of yearning after God almost sixty years ago, pastor and writer A. W. Tozer remarked, "To have found God and still pursue Him is the soul's paradox of love, scorned indeed by the too-easily-satisfied religionist, but justified in happy experience by the children of the burning heart."³⁴ To paraphrase Tozer: "To know Christ and still seek to know him is the soul's paradox of love, scorned indeed by the too-easily-satisfied religionist, but justified in happy experience by the children of the burning heart." The apostle Paul experienced this paradox. The same Greek word Paul used for "know" (γινωνσκω) in Philippians 3:10—"that I may know Him"—is a cognate of the same word rendered "knew" in the Septuagint in Genesis 4:1: "Now Adam knew Eve his wife." A word used for the physical intimacy a husband and wife shares, is the same word used for the spiritual intimacy Paul aspired to experience with the Lord Jesus Christ, an intimacy every thirsty-hearted disciple longs for in his or her relation to the living Christ. Paul yearned to know Christ in a richer, deeper, and fuller measure.

Kenneth Boa says the same consuming aspiration to know Christ more intimately and fully should be regarded as the calling of every Christian: "Having entered into a relationship with the personal Creator of the universe, our highest calling is to know him in a deeper and richer way."³⁵ It certainly was this same yearning after God that caused the psalmists to cry out:

O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you;
my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.³⁶ 

Again, 

As a deer pants for flowing streams,
so pants my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When shall I come and appear before God?³⁷ 

Philippians 3:10

This passionate desire to cultivate and express a love for Christ is expressed by the apostle Paul in two dimensions—dimensions in which Paul said he wanted to know Christ more fully, intimately and increasingly: "that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death."³⁸ These two dimensions—resurrection power and the fellowship of Christ's sufferings (as I'll explain later, conformity to Christ's death is an expansion of Paul's concept of "becoming like him in his death.")—are not dimensions of knowledge separate and distinct from knowing Christ, but dimensions vitally connected to a growth in one's knowledge of Christ. ● 

- Soli Deo Gloria -

Unless otherwise noted, the Bible version used in this article is the English Standard Version. 

25. John 5:39-40.
26. Dennis F. Kinlaw, This Day With the Master: 365 Daily Meditations, January 25.
27. Packer, Knowing God, p. 21-22. Emphasis added.
28. Alister McGrath, Knowing Christ in Our Hearts, p. 41.
29. Ephesians 3:17. Emphasis added.
30. John Stott,  God's New Society: The Message of Ephesians, p. 135.
31. See Philippians 3:5-6.
32. Philippians 3:7-8. Emphasis added.
33. Philippians 3:10. Emphasis added.
34. A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God, p. 15.
35. Kenneth Boa, Conformed to His Image, p. 219.
36. Psalm 63:1.
37. Psalm 42:1-2.
38. Philippians 3:10.