God knows every person perfectly, yet people do not know him in the same way. He wants them to change that, and discovering who he is takes a lifetime.
Believers know him as Jehovah, the God of the Bible, and they learn who he is through his Son, Jesus Christ. Even so, God has countless facets, wonderful things to find out about him and many avenues to understanding him.
The desire makes sense to anyone who has loved another person. Love wants to know the beloved and to be known in return, to reach the inside of a person and feel what that person feels. God longs for that same closeness, and he wants his children to know him.
And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.
1 Corinthians 8:3 tells us, “But whoever loves God is known by God.” I take from this that love makes a person want to know the one who is loved and to be known in return. God wants to be known by his children in this way. Could we not infer that reading his Word brings a humbling realization of how little anyone actually knows of him.
Satan has blinded unbelievers to this truth. Some believers, though not necessarily blinded, live barren lives because they are so occupied with activity that they never stop to get to know God.
Do Christians gain some kind of automatic knowledge of God when they are saved? Or does knowing him require time and attention?
but grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To Him be the glory, both now and to the day of eternity. Amen.
Something is wrong when a believer has no desire to know God. A Christian who feels no hunger for the God they serve has a problem worth examining. Believers will spend eternity with him, so getting to know him now is a good thing to do.
I believe that desire is one of the reasons God still speaks. He wants to express and reveal himself so that people understand him. Why? The better a person knows God, the more that person loves him. The more they love him, the more they want to serve him. For this to happen, believers must make sure they hear what God says and listen to him.
 The one who has My commandments and keeps them is the one who loves Me; and the one who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and will reveal Myself to him.
You can find instructions online for how to build just about anything. But there is one subject that matters far more than any do-it-yourself skill, and that is how to be born again. Jesus was clear that being born again is necessary for anyone who wants to enter the kingdom of heaven. But what does that mean?
Recognising that every person is under the weight of sin, and then surrendering yourself fully to Jesus, asking him to come into your life and take all of you it what I’m talking about. When you do that, your sins can be forgiven and you can have confidence about where you are going when this life is over.
God asks only one thing of us: Don’t reject the precious gift of salvation. He’s opened the door. Will you walk through it?
 Jesus responded and said to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless someone is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.
Nearly five hundred years ago, Martin Luther sparked one of the most significant religious transformations in history by recovering the ancient gospel truth that salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. The Reformation that followed reshaped the landscape of Christianity in the Western world. Yet Luther himself struggled with the letter of James, famously referring to it with some unease, precisely because of a verse that can appear to contradict the very principle he had championed. James 2:24 declares: “A man is justified by works and not by faith alone.” How do we hold that alongside Paul’s declaration in Romans that a man is justified by faith apart from the works of the law?
The resolution lies in recognising that Paul and James, while using the same vocabulary, are addressing different questions and different audiences. Paul is answering the question of how a sinner stands righteous before God: the answer is by grace, through faith, not by any human effort or merit. James is addressing a different question: how do we know whether someone’s faith is genuine? And his answer is: by the evidence of their life.
Works do not provide salvation. But works do demonstrate salvation. Faith, by its very nature, cannot be seen. It is an internal disposition of trust and reliance upon Christ. The watching world, whether believers or unbelievers, cannot examine a person’s faith directly. What they can examine is conduct.
Paul himself captures this harmoniously in Ephesians chapter 2: we are saved by grace through faith, and we are saved unto good works, which God has prepared in advance for us to walk in.
Ephesians 2:8-9
For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
