Knowing God Changes Everything with Christine Gordon
On today’s episode we’re kicking off our 2021 series: Knowing and Loving God. As we think about the journey we are all walking, we really believe that God is who we need. He is worthy of consideration. He is worthy of, not only our attention, but our very lives. He is worthy of worship! We pray that these conversations will faithfully point you to him and encourage you as you seek to glorify him in everything you do. I know your hearts are going to be so refreshed as we consider who God is together and hear from mentors who faithfully point us to his son, Jesus, in every one of these conversations. Today we get to hear from Christine Gordon (aka Chris), co-author of At His Feet Bible Studies who earned her Master of Arts in Theological Studies at Covenant Seminary.
INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
Can you tell us a little about who you are and what you do?
How much of God can we know?
What are the primary ways that God reveals himself to us?
What are the results of having a skewed or inaccurate view of God?
Can we ever fully understand God?
How do we learn more about God?
J.I. Packer says, “One can know a great deal about God without much knowledge of him.” What do you think he means by that?
What characterizes people who know God?
How does knowing and loving God change who we are and the way we live?
Was there ever a time in your life when you didn’t feel like seeking to know and love God?
NOTEWORTHY QUOTES
“When we talk about knowing God, we are talking about him in the relational sense. We don’t talk about him like the periodic table or like tax law, because he’s a person.”
“We can know enough about God. We are finite, he is not. We will always be finite, so in that way we will never know the fullness of God. And that is not a bad thing. He has revealed himself in so many ways in his kindness, compassion, justice, and mercy. We can know enough. That’s what we can know.”
“God wants to be known, and the ways he chooses to make himself known are so complex… it’s as if God has launched this massive PR campaign to show us who he is because he wants to be known. He does it in the skies above, he does it in the stars, he does it in his Word, he does it in Jesus. How do we know him? He’s everywhere.”
“General revelation: nature, man’s conscience. Special revelation: the Word, the incarnation”
“We read it, we study it, we sing it, and then we watch this man as he walks around as God in the flesh.”
“Anytime you try to talk about who Jesus is or who God is with any kind of substance, what you're doing is theology. When you sing to your kids, ‘Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so,’ you're doing theology.”
“Bad theology hurts people… because how we know God and what we think of him trickles down to every other part of our life. It trickles down to what we think about ourselves, what we think about our relationship with him, his relationship to us, his relationship to the world, our relationship to the world around us… everything is affected by what we think of him. So if we have bad theology, it’s going to hurt us eventually.”
“In our humanity we want to fully grasp everything, and part of that is because we want control, but we will never control him. That also means that we may never fully understand him. Even in the new heavens and new earth we are not going to be infinite, and he is.” (Job 38, Isaiah 40)
“Just like the little girl looks up at her dad and she knows enough to know he’s trustworthy, we don’t have to fully understand him to fully trust him.”
“Jesus came and lived and died as a human and the reality is, he fully knows us and that is way more what we need than for us to fully understand him. We know enough. We know what we need to know to trust him.”
“God is a person, and his children as they grow are more and more like him, so one way we know him is by getting to know his children… Look at the people of God, look at them as a family, look at how they love each other. That is one way we can know him.”
“He will disrupt you in the places where you try to master him and become him. He will keep disrupting you because he’s faithful, it’s who he is. He is after you and he’s not going to give up.”
“Relationships with a person are based on trust. Intimacy grows through the time that you spend. Heart knowledge happens through connection and conversation and honesty, and that kind of knowledge is not a bunch of facts. It’s not even a good systematic theology. It’s a heart of flesh that’s given to us by the Holy Spirit.”
“A lot of us do know a lot about God, but we do not know him. We don’t trust him, there’s no intimacy, there’s not a give and take, a push and pull, a crying out and waiting on him, and that’s a big difference. That’s a danger when we study him.”
“What did Jesus look like as he walked around this earth? He was patient and kind, he didn’t keep a record of wrong, he approached people that everybody else rejected, he went after the outsider, he was quick to forgive when people acknowledged their sin, he cared about the poor and the marginalized. One of the big things was that his actions matched his words - he had perfect integrity. He trusted his father, he loved his father and it was so obvious. He held the kingdom as his first priority and everything else came after that.”
“The Christian life is a fight, and I think that’s something that we don’t like to talk about. But we wrestle, we plead, we fight our sin, we cry out, we rejoice, we abide in him, we love him, it’s this growing intimacy. Of course our growth is cyclical and it’s never a straight line, but I think you can see these things in people.”
“It is not unusual to go through a period of doubt. You are not alone. This is normative. Don’t think that God has left you.”
Practical steps:
- “Find someone to read the Bible with you and check in with each other about it.”
- “Find some place that speaks to you in the Bible about God’s faithfulness, write it down, and put it in front of you. Remember: God is more invested in this than you are.”
HYMN
How Great Thou Art
SCRIPTURE REFERENCES
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
What are the primary ways that God reveals himself to us?
How can you know God more?
How does knowing and loving God change who you are and the way you live?
What specific steps can you take to grow in your knowledge of and love for God?
What are you going to do or implement as a result of what you’ve learned this week?
IMPORTANT NOTE
Journeywomen interviews are intended to serve as a springboard for continued study in the context of your local church. While we carefully select guests each week, interviews do not imply Journeywomen's endorsement of all writings and positions of the interviewee or any other resources mentioned.
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