Why Do I Need To Know God?

"I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you," Jesus says in John 15:15. 

By CHERYL ROGERS

Relationships, all kinds of relationships, take time. We can expect nothing different when it comes to God, especially a God we cannot see.

Most of us learn about him as children. We hear about Adam and Eve and how God made us. We may attend a church and learn about sin and how God will punish us if we do the wrong thing.

But getting to know God better requires effort on our part. It takes seeking God and being open to what he has for us. It also takes a willingness to be obedient.

My own journey towards God never got off the ground until I surrendered my life -- and meant it. Let me explain with a little story.

Imagine this: Say you're a kid trying to put together a model sailboat. You look over the pieces, but you can't figure how they go together. You go to your dad and ask for help.

"Hey, dad, can you help me put together this sailboat?"

"Sure," he replies, "bring over the instruction sheet. We'll look over it together."

Then you go back to your sailboat parts and ignore him. You sit there turning the parts around and around in your hands and never take your dad the instruction sheet.

Unfortunately, some of us do just that. I know I did.

I asked Jesus to be my Savior, but I ignored his instruction manual -- the Bible. I went back to doing things the way I always had.

By doing this, I didn't let God help me much, for many years.

So getting to know God better requires a willingness to surrender ourselves to him completely, to trust in him and not in ourselves, or what we've been taught. Until we reach that point, we are free -- to keep doing the same things and making the same mistakes, over and over again.

Once we invite God in, we need to make a commitment to the relationship. We need to decide to obey him before we can expect lasting change. We need to learn to spend time with God alone, learning about him and listening for his voice.

It should be frequent, much the same as you would spend time with a family member or friend.

Then we learn what God wants to teach us, not only about himself, but about how to really live and grow into the person he made us to be. We learn how to avoid many of the pitfalls the devil has laid for us.

We probably will find he wants us to make a few changes. We need to trust him to give us the strength to walk away from the things that have entrapped us. We need to trust that what he wants -- and ask of us -- is best.

We also need to spend time sharing with him our innermost feelings. It's not that he doesn't already know. He wants to hear from us and invite him to help us.

Just expressing our emotions helps us to deal with them, too.

Going to church -- a church where others know him -- will likely be a valuable part of God's plan. We can learn about God from others and their experiences.

But if church is all we do, we may be trapped in religion. We have the comfort of appearing good and holy on the outside, but on the inside we can be empty. We can feel very alone, or afraid.

And we limit God.

We sure don't want to do that.