To know Him is to have our eyes opened to see Him in his beauty, holiness, lovingkindness and faithfulness. Lately an old Rodgers and Hammerstein song from the musical “The King and I” came floating back to my memory:
Getting to know you, getting to know all about you…
Getting to know you, getting to feel free and easy When I am with you …
Because of all the beautiful and new Things I'm learning about you day by day.
Day by day He issues a warm invitation to get to know Him and His ways. But He is also insistent that we not make Him in our own image. He is neither the passive, permissive father some of us would have Him be, nor the shaming, demanding father others of us fear Him to be. When we yield our ideas of what we have thought Him to be, and surrender to the gentle, persistent call of the Spirit to know Him as He really is, the journey of revelation begins. If we respond to His pursuit by asking Him to open the eyes of our hearts to know Him, He will respond and meet us where we are in the journey. And He will uncover the lies we have believed about his fatherhood.
We can then begin to see and take in by experience His attributes – His tender mercies, His might to deliver, His majesty, His encompassing truth, His holiness, His goodness, His constancy on our behalf. He is perfect in all His ways, full of mystery yet willing to makes his mysteries known. As we understand and receive these aspects of the Father, they coalesce into a new image, a fuller, clearer truer picture of our dear heavenly Father. But we have to be willing to lay aside our expectations and ideas, often based in pain from our past, trading up for new reality.
We have all experienced imperfect fathering from our earthly fathers and step-fathers, and often unknowingly transfer these experiences onto our heavenly Father. But God is not a shadow of our earthly fathers - He is the Lord! And as the Spirit brings us truth, these old ideas and shadows fall away in the light of Who he is. He is not only the holy God, full of glory and majesty, to whom belong all of the grandeur of heaven and earth, He is also the One who bends low to redeem us and call us to Himself.
Because we are now in Christ, we are empowered to know God the Father, and to be filled with the knowledge of His light and truth. He is in our midst, making Himself known, occasionally offending and upsetting our ideas, but always calling us to a greater reality. And Jesus said that if we know Him, we will know the Father also (Jn. 14:6-7), and gloriously someday we will know Him fully, just as we are now known! (I Cor. 13:12)
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