Day 24

“I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.” — PHILIPPIANS 3:10

We can know Christ intellectually, and be conversant with facts about His virgin birth, His public ministry, His crucifixion, His resurrection and His ascension. We can know Him intermittently, with vivid memory of coming to know Him, but the busyness of life and neglect of His word has caused my relationship to Him to wane. We can know Him intimately where Christ is our life and our Lord, and we live each day in communion with Him.

The Christian life is not an experience that we look back on in our history - though many experiences may be involved in our Christian lives. It is not a feeling, though feelings too may be involved at various times in various ways. The Christian life is essentially a relationship. It is ‘knowing God’, and ‘knowing Christ’. Not only having ‘come to know Him’, in the past tense, but it is a continual increasing knowing of Him in the on-going present tense. This is Paul’s cry as a man who has been a Christian for many years, “I want to know Christ….”. 

All relationships grow to the measure in which the communication is good. When husbands and wives stop talking and listening, the marriage is in difficulty. When governments stop listening to their people, they flounder and collapse. When a Christian stops talking to, and listening to God, the Christian life withers and dies, leaving only an empty shell of routine devoid of life and sparkle. 

When Paul said, “I want to know Christ”, he didn’t mean intellectually or intermittently, but personally and intimately out of the longing of his heart. We too can know Him this way in an ever deepening relationship of love, trust and obedience. 

PRAYER: Dear precious Lord, it is such a divine privilege to know You. I pray with the longing of Paul, that my relationship with You will grow deeper and broader every day. Fill me with yourself, and allow me to come to know You more and more.

TO REFLECT UPON: Am I coming to know Christ better with every experience of life being a potential moment of revelation of deeper things about Him?