You know you’re in a “season” when weeks go by and the Spirit keeps you focused on the same thing, no matter what you are reading. The work of this season of my life in Christ is to keep speaking to my audience about the importance of knowing God. I do not really know who my audience is these days… But I must be faithful to the source of my joy and keep talking of what we share that is the source of that joy… Knowing Him.

On my side of the equation, it is a terribly flawed relationship. I am far less consistent in my devotion to my Lord and Friend than he deserves. Yet this I know of Him: the right response to every failure of mine is to keep running back to Him, because His gracious self always forgives. He who told us to forgive 7 times 70 (I.e., 490, also known as “too many to count”) does so himself, because there is no hypocrisy in him, not a hint.

So I awaken every day to my ever present Friend and the offer to know Him, and the New Covenant promise to know Him. To live worthy of that great honor is also, I have learned, the means by which every thing promised by Him is realized — the peace, the wisdom, the soul’s rest, the security and safety. These were never designed to be available apart from knowing God, not in any substantial and enduring way.

I saw something new in the Scripture last night about knowing God — that our so-called natural desires, the will to do right or wrong, to crave what is good or what is evil, is either supported or abandoned by the Lord, in response to our actual choices. It is in Romans 1:28, and reading it in the CJB (Complete Jewish Bible) translation made it abundantly clear: “…since they have not considered God worth knowing, God has given them up to worthless ways of thinking; so that they do improper things.”

The immediate context is those who choose to engage in what God considers sexual perversion, but it is surely a general principle as well, an insight into how God works in response to our choices. I have seen ample evidence in the Bible that God essentially gives us what we really want. In fact, My students will verify that I am fond of saying God doesn’t need to come up with a punishment for our sin, he just lets us have what we really want and that choice will eventually punish us by its natural consequences.

So that concept is well established in my mind, but I have never before seen the very inclination towards good or evil connected so clearly to our value or lack of value for knowing God. It is tempting to think we are pretty much on our own when it comes to the inward struggle of choosing right or wrong, but this is not true. Philippians 2:13 negates this idea when it says, “…for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.” (NASB).

This I know of God also: he is not quick to give us over to our bad choices. He is long suffering. He is seen repeatedly in Scripture giving his people an incredible number of chances to choose what is right before “giving them over.” Yet, if we stubbornly adhere to a lifestyle of “not considering God worth knowing,” the day will come when God will cease his efforts to turn you towards his heart and totally let you have a life without Him. And there is a terrifying list of possibilities in the verses immediately following Romans 1:28…. All shades of evil character. You don’t want to become that person!

The wonderfully positive side of this truth is that when God sees any movement in your heart and mind towards the desire to know him, his Spirit steps right up and says, “Here, let me help you!”