More and more I feel the desire to get to know Jesus better. I have known about Him my whole life. I committed my life to being a disciple of Jesus years ago. I remember him every week around the Lord’s table. My desire to get to know Jesus only grows. I want his thoughts to become my thoughts, his attitude to become my attitude…just as Paul said, I desire for Christ to be formed in me and I know that requires me to get to know Jesus.
How do we get to know Jesus
First, I believe through the Bible…not just the Gospels and not just the New Testament. We get to know Jesus through the Bible…cover to cover. You cannot even begin the Bible without getting Jesus right in the middle of things. The presence of the Holy Spirit is more obvious in Genesis 1:1 than Jesus and yet Paul tells us that all things that have been made were made through Jesus Christ (Col 1:16). The apostle John tells us the same thing in John 1:1-3 as John mirrors the language of the creation story (really the Genesis parallels run further through John 1),
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.”
If you want to immerse yourself in Jesus and explode your understanding of him you need to understand the Old Testament. You need to understand Judaism. You need to understand history. You need to understand culture. You need to understand language. Jesus can certainly be understood on a much more basic level than this. Faith does not require such an extensive understanding but my heart does.
Second, I believe we get to know Jesus through the Christian community. When we spend time with other Christians…love them and them love us…we get to know Jesus. When we sacrifice for each other, help each other, bear each other’s burdens…we get to know Jesus. We understand him better through our shared time together with others who also love and are following Jesus.
Third, we get to know Jesus through our own individual experience. The more we go through life and witness His faithfulness to us the better we get to know Him. This is not book, chapter and verse knowledge. This is not even completely head knowledge. This is another kind of knowledge. This is heart knowledge. He endears himself to us and us to Him through life experiences that point us to His character and His love for us.
I want to know Jesus more tomorrow than I do today. I hope you do too!
