The contemporary church is filled with many believers and very few who know. Many people believe that there is a God. They believe that God has a plan for their life. They believe that all things work together for the good of those who love them, but these very same people do not know this as a fact.

There is a major difference between knowing and believing. The Bible tells us that we must believe that God is and that He is the rewarded of those who perform his will. On many other occasions, the Bible talks about believing in order to be saved. However, as I study the scriptures, Christian communities and the meaning of words, it become evident that a Christian must know God rather than simply believe.

Think of belief in God as having the belief that you have cancer. Do you have cancer or not? Well you believe that you do, but you do not know. How do you find out? You get tested. Unless you know something, you cannot say with certainty that it exist. Cancer may be too strong. So let’s look at friendship as another good example. We all have friends and people we trust. For most of us, we believe they are our friends in the good times. However, only when something happens do we find out who our friends truly are. Another example is credit score. We can believe that we have a good score or a bad score, but until we run the report, we will not truly know. Each of those examples distinguished the difference between knowing something with certainty and simply believing.

The same is true with God. I can understand if someone became saved a month or two ago and do not know that God is. But to have been saved for many years and you don’t know but believe is troubling. Knowing makes the difference when you lose your job and you ask God why did He let this happen, instead of where are you taking me. Knowing is what makes the difference when you are faced with a difficult situation and you ask God why did you let this happen to me instead of, what am I suppose to learn from this.

Knowing God is essential to Christian growth. Too much of Christianity is based on belief in God rather than knowing God. Some of you may say this is just semantics. It is not. Consider people who have lost their faith. Is that even possible? Can anyone truly lose their faith? I don’t believe so. How can anyone lose faith in something they know to be true? You can’t. People lose faith in things they simply believe in. The reason many people lose faith and leave the church is because they simply believed in God and somewhere down the road, they were persuaded otherwise.

Some will say all you have to do is believe; no one can know. That is not true. God never intended for us to know him by testing him in a lab. We know God because he will reveal himself to us. Scripture clearly tells us that we are supposed to know. After Jesus reappeared to prove to Thomas that He has risen, he said, “blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29). The night before Jesus was arrested He explicitly told the disciples how we who will not see Him will know that God is who he says he is. He said, “The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. ¹⁸I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. ¹⁹Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live” (John 14:17-19).

In order for us to preserve the church, we must teach people to know God and go beyond simply believing. We must know that he loves us and of his plans for our lives. This knowing should not be based on an intellectual knowing but on the indwelling Holy Spirit, which Jesus left as our comforter. God did not call us to have an abstract belief concerning him, he called us to know him.

Tags: Bible, Christ, Christian, Christianity, God, Jesus, Religion

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