This morning I was revisiting a favorite book by A.W. Tozer The Pursuit of Man.
He used a wonderful illustration to make the important distinction between knowing about Christ and His love andknowing it experientially.
Tozer asked, “What good would it do a starving child to know about bread when his stomach rolled and growled begging for food to be satisfied?”
A person can die of starvation knowing all about the nutritional value of fruits and vegetables but knowing about them will not save him from starving!
“Knowledge by acquaintance is always better than mere knowledge by description.”
With that illustration in mind, I wondered about the love of God. It is not uncommon to hear people proclaim that God is love, that He is by nature a loving and caring being.
Wouldn’t life be more viscerally satisfying if we knew those truths by acquaintance rather than description?Â
Maurice Roberts wrote on the subject of sensing the love of God and he suggested:
“The way to get God’s felt blessing on our hearts begins with an act of faith. That is to say we must believe that there is such a thing to be had in this life. If we do not expect or even believe in such experiences, the probability is that we shall know but little of them.
There is, as we have sought to show, a true and scriptural enjoyment of Christ which is no fanaticism but the subjective fruit of the gospel.
Then, having become convinced that there is a genuine experience of a ‘felt Christ’ to be had on earth, we must go to God in prayer for it. We come to the throne of grace as suppliants to receive this choice favor of ‘tasting’, or being made subjectively conscious of the love God has to us in Christ.
We do harm to our souls and hinder our own progress in the knowledge of God (remember how that differs from knowing about God) if we treat prayer as an exercise of the mind only and do not expect to emerge from the presence of God with a fresh token of His love born in us. ((Maurice Roberts, The Thought of God, The Banner of Truth Trust, 1993, p.61))
What vitality would be breathed into our living if we stopped existing on the knowledge about God and sunk our teeth into subjective experience of tasting and seeing that God is good! Psalm 34:8
Let’s starve no more!