Light of the World Today
Part 1 showed you the difference between knowing about God and actually knowing him. Part 2 deals with the barriers that keep people from the relationship they were designed for and how to break through every one of them starting today.
"Look! I stand at the door and knock. If you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in, and we will share a meal together as friends."
Revelation 3:20 NLT
Revelation 3:20 is one of the most misused verses in the entire New Testament. It is almost always quoted as an evangelistic invitation to people who have never followed Christ. And while it can apply in that context, the original letter was written to the church at Laodicea. To believers. To people who were already using the name of Jesus, already attending gatherings in his name, already calling themselves his followers. And Jesus said to those people that he was standing outside the door knocking. He had not left. He had not withdrawn his love. But the relationship had drifted to a place where he was on the outside of the life he was meant to inhabit from the inside. And that quiet, gentle, persistent knocking is one of the most honest and the most searching images in all of Scripture for what happens to a believing person who has allowed every other thing to occupy the interior of their daily life while the relationship with Christ has been gradually moved toward the margins.
The question this part asks is direct and personal. Is Jesus on the inside or outside of your actual daily life right now? Not your theological position. Your actual daily experience. Does he inhabit the ordinary hours of your Monday or does he appear primarily on Sunday and in crisis? Because the person who knows God for themselves is the person for whom God is genuinely present in the ordinary, not merely consulted in the exceptional.
Three Barriers That Keep People From Genuinely Knowing God
Barrier 1: A secondhand relationship inherited rather than personally owned
Many people who would describe themselves as Christians are living with a secondhand relationship with God. They know what they were told about him by parents, by a pastor, by a church tradition or by the culture they grew up in. They have accepted those descriptions as their own without ever personally encountering the God being described. Their faith is real in the sense that they genuinely believe what they have been taught. But it is not yet personal in the sense of 1 John 1:1-3 in the NLT where John says we proclaim to you the one who existed from the beginning, whom we have heard and seen. We watched with our own eyes and touched with our own hands. A secondhand faith can produce correct doctrine without producing genuine encounter. And the moment the pressure comes, or the difficulty is severe enough, or the season is dry enough, the secondhand faith that has never been personally tested in firsthand encounter often finds it has insufficient root to hold.
"I have heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you."
Job 42:5 NKJV
Job 42:5 in the NKJV captures the transition from secondhand to firsthand with precision. I have heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you. Before the affliction Job knew about God. After the affliction, having encountered God in the most direct and personal way possible through his suffering, he knew him. The hearing of the ear is secondhand. The seeing of the eye is firsthand. And the Christian life that has never moved from the hearing stage to the seeing stage is a Christian life that has not yet fully arrived at what it was designed to be.
Barrier 2: Busyness that crowds out the silence where God speaks
Psalm 46:10 in the NIV says be still and know that I am God. The connection between stillness and knowing is not incidental. It is architectural. The knowing that this verse describes is available in the stillness and is consistently unavailable to the person whose interior life is too full and too fast to receive it. The modern world is extraordinarily effective at filling every available moment with noise, information, entertainment and demand. And the person who has allowed that filling to crowd out the stillness that knowing God requires has not lost access to God. They have lost the quiet in which his voice is most clearly heard. 1 Kings 19 records Elijah looking for God in a great wind that tore the mountains apart. God was not in the wind. Then in an earthquake. God was not in the earthquake. Then in a fire. God was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. And God was in the whisper. The God who speaks in whispers requires a life with enough stillness to hear one.
Barrier 3: Guilt and shame that makes a person feel unworthy of close access
This is perhaps the most quietly devastating barrier of all because it operates against the very people who most need to know God more deeply. The person who carries unconfessed guilt or a settled shame about their past or their present failures often withdraws from the very presence of God that is the only genuine source of healing for those feelings. They stay at the periphery of the relationship because they believe they are not qualified for anything closer. And the tragic irony is that the closer to God they came the more quickly those feelings would be addressed. Hebrews 4:16 in the NLT says let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God. There we will receive his mercy and we will find grace to help us when we need it most. Boldly. To the throne of a God who is specifically described in that verse as gracious. Not as a courtroom judge waiting to enumerate your failures. As a gracious God at whose throne mercy and grace are the specific things on offer to the person who approaches. Guilt and shame are not reasons to stay away from God. They are the very reasons to come closer.
"Let us then approach God's throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need."
Hebrews 4:16 NIV
What Changes When You Genuinely Know God
Daniel 11:32 in the NKJV contains one of the most quietly powerful statements in the entire Old Testament. The people who know their God shall be strong and carry out great exploits. Not the people who know the most theology. Not the people who have the most impressive spiritual history. The people who know their God. The knowing produces the strength. The strength enables the exploits. And the sequence cannot be reversed. You cannot produce the exploits by working harder at ministry while the knowing remains shallow. The knowing must come first. And when it does the strength that comes from genuine, deep, firsthand, personally encountered knowledge of God produces a person who is simply different from the person they were before. Not more impressive. More rooted. More settled. More able to face what previously would have caused retreat. The person who knows their God is the person who can stand in the fire and not be burned, who can face the lion's den and not be consumed, who can look at the giants and see them through the eyes of the God who already owns the field they are standing on.
"The people who know their God shall be strong, and carry out great exploits."
Daniel 11:32 NKJV
And John 10:4 in the NLT says he walks ahead of them and they follow him because they know his voice. The sheep who knows the voice of the shepherd navigates the most complex and the most dangerous terrain with a confidence that the sheep who does not know the voice cannot access. Because the sheep is not primarily following a map. It is following the shepherd. And the person who knows God well enough to recognise his voice in the ordinary moments of daily life, in the nudge toward a particular decision, in the settled peace or the restless unease that arrives in the presence of a specific choice, is the person who navigates life from the inside of a relationship rather than from the outside of a religion. That is what knowing God for yourself actually produces. And it is available to you. Starting today.
So the Light of the World word for today is this. He is at the door and he is knocking. Not hammering. Not demanding. Knocking with the patience of someone who will not force what can only be given freely. The barriers are real but none of them is stronger than the relationship that is available on the other side of the door you open. Move from secondhand to firsthand. Clear the noise for the stillness where the whisper lives. Come boldly to the throne of grace rather than retreating from it. And know your God in the way that Daniel 11:32 describes, the knowing that makes you strong, that produces the exploits and that makes you someone the world around you cannot easily explain.
Memory verse for today
"The people who know their God shall be strong, and carry out great exploits."
Daniel 11:32 NKJV