I was blessed recently in the writings of Malcolm Webber, namely his book "To Enjoy Him Forever". So often new believers are discipled by getting them to imitate Christ by focusing on outward acts of piety while largely ignoring the heart motivations. This is precisely where the Pharisees went wrong. From the outside everything looks good and well. But inside it is mostly a sham. While I don't want to get out of balance and seem to denigrate Bible study or obedience, I do want to get the horse in front of the cart here. If Christianity is anything, it is a personal intimate love relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. Focusing and abandoning oneself to Him and His love for us (grace) will result in a corresponding love for Him and trust in Him. So the duties, disciplines and means of grace will not be seen as burdensome or irksome tasks done out of necessity, but privileges that are our delight and joy to do because of love for God and desire to please Him at all costs. I am not saying that we will always feel joy in obeying God, sometimes we won't. But if we love someone, we care for that person more than we care about our own needs or feelings. Below is an extract from Mr. Webber's book. If you would like to download it and read the whole thing, here is the link:
http://coursematerials.vision.edu/le504/to_enjoy_him_forever.pdf
The fellowship that was God’s original intention in creating and then redeeming man, is a real fellowship – an actual experience of fellowship. Just as Adam walked and talked with God in the Garden in the cool of the day, so those who have been graciously restored to a state of peace with God should not be content merely to discuss the Christian life and to theorize about it, but they should be satisfied with nothing less than actually experiencing what Jesus died to make possible: a genuine communion and fellowship with the eternal God.
It is true of all of us that our knowledge exceeds our experience. To some extent in each of our lives, the things we know about God – His power, His holiness, His love, His being – go far beyond what we have personally experienced of Him. Many ears have heard of God, but few eyes have seen Him.
This breach between head-knowledge and heart-experience is a dissatisfying thing – or at least God wants it to be.
By offering glimpses of Himself to our mind’s comprehension, God intends to inspire in us a seeking after the experience of the same things that we understand – a longing that we not merely be acquainted with Him, but that we experience intimate fellowship with Him. One of the reasons why God approaches our minds to give us a mental understanding in the first place is to direct our energy of seeking. This seeking, when it is finished, will attain His desired goal for us which is the true experiential knowledge of Himself.
God wants the discrepancy between our intellectual knowledge of Him and our heart experience of Him to frustrate us, in the sense of provoking us to dissatisfaction with a purely theoretical and academic Christianity, and prodding and goading us to seek an experiential and real Christianity.
At times, however, we have all made the mistake of receiving the knowledge, the mental comprehension, without also yielding to the Divine impulse to seek. This omission is not so bad in itself as it leaves open the future possibility of coming to a place of seeking. What is bad is when we have, for whatever reason, avoided altogether the seeking while substituting the intellectual theory for the life-experience.
Then when we present the theory of a particular spiritual truth to others and do not ourselves yet possess the experience of that truth, we will only impart what we possess; namely the theory alone. If the theory has become an adequate substitute for the experience in our own lives, then that will be all we impart to others – a substitute.1
1George Whitefield declared: “I am persuaded the generality of preachers talk of an unknown and unfelt Christ. The reason why congregations have been so dead is because they had dead men preaching to them.”
And this substitute is harmful and quite spiritually debilitating when we are satisfied with it, because we deceive ourselves that we have the genuine experience when all we really do have is an intellectual comprehension of the theory about the experience. But since we mistakenly believe we already possess the experience, we find in our hearts no inspiration nor even need to seek for the reality of the experience. Thus enamored with our own religious ideas, we become lovers of philosophical doctrines more than lovers of God, all under the guise of “truth”.
Our knowledge, which should have been good in propelling us to seek the experience, turns on us and slays us, robbing us of the experience – robbing us of God!
The Word of God Will Bring Us to Its Author
Jesus died to bring us to God, to restore us to fellowship with God. His death was not a theological construct but a fact; and so is the relationship with Himself and His Father that He purposed should be ours through His death.
We dare not reduce the Christian life to a mere theory of legal standing. We think we are “staying with the Word”, but we are NOT staying with the Word, because the Word of God points us to God, to the reality of Christian experience of God. We who make our boast of the Word, let us not through disregarding the Word dishonor God.
No, we are not saying that our legal standing with God is not relevant nor important. He has given us a glorious judicial standing of righteousness before Himself; but that is not the whole story. It was necessary for God to give us a legal standing before Him, just so that He could give us an actual standing before Him. That is His desire: not that we content ourselves with discussing and debating our purely judicial right-standing with God, but that we earnestly seek the only thing that will really satisfy a born again heart, which is the true fellowship of love with God that He intended from all eternity.
We must free ourselves from the constraints of our Western culture at this point. Inheriting the attitude from the Greek philosophers Socrates and Aristotle, our culture puts a premium on education. The educated man is honored as the good man; the unschooled and ignorant man is pitied as the fool. Only an educated man can be happy and fulfilled. Knowledge is the supreme goal of our Western society. Information has become an end in itself. Reason is supreme. Man’s intellect is sufficient. Scholarship is equated with maturity.
This perspective has unfortunately been carried over from the world into the church,1 so that it has become more important for us to understand doctrines about God, than it is to experience Him and to be changed by Him. Knowledge in itself has become sufficient to us. Experience of God is seen as something only those few weak ones with a “mystical” bent ever pursue. This whole attitude has spelled tragedy in the church, and the great predominance of religious knowledge without living relationship with Jesus is a fundamental cause of the frequency of pride, carnal sectarianism, debate, strife and spiritual “blood-letting” in the true Christian community today.
1The serious infection of Christianity with Greek philosophical values began in the third and fourth centuries.
The world has never known God through its human scholarship and wisdom, and neither will we by those means. We will never work, nor think, our way up to God. The Gospel of the Apostles was not with excellency of speech nor with wisdom of words, but it was in demonstration of the Spirit and of power. It was with the movings and the conviction of the Holy Spirit upon the hearts of men. The wisdom they did speak was spiritual wisdom coming by revelation from God.
This wisdom is not the boastful wisdom of the labor of the human intellect, but it is the wisdom that the Holy Spirit, by revelation, teaches to a surrendered heart; communicating spiritual things by spiritual means. Hidden from scholars and revealed only to “babes”, this wisdom is foolishness to even the wisest of the world. The natural man is not able to understand this wisdom which can only be “spiritually discerned”; and neither are Christians who walk and think and approach spiritual matters as natural men.
The Word of God is given to man as a means to bring us to Jesus; to bring us to know Jesus; to bring us to experience Jesus; to bring us to a life of obedience to Jesus; to bring us to a fellowship of love with Jesus. Our knowledge of the Word of God should not be an end in itself. It should be a means to a greater end: the personal experience of Jesus. The experience of the love of God “passeth knowledge”. We must not be satisfied with a merely academic understanding about redemption and about God; we must seek to experience redemption and to know God and to be known and changed by Him.
This will not be accomplished through restless academic exercise, but it is only as we behold the “glory of God in the face (and Presence) of Jesus Christ”, that we will be changed into His image by the Spirit of the Lord. Without this experience, our Christianity will be more a change of opinion than a change of heart and life. Without this experience, we will only ever possess the outward “form” of knowledge and of Truth – real knowledge, real Truth is in the inward parts. Truth will bring life. Truth will change our hearts. It is the very “Breath” of God.
The Balance of the Christian Life
Our knowledge of the Word of Truth has many God-ordained purposes, some of which are as follows. Firstly, our knowledge of the Word of God, by the revelation of the Holy Spirit, should lead us into the personal experience and knowledge of God. “And we know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we may know Him that is true”. Then, our knowledge of the Word will help us to understand and articulate that experience. Finally, our knowledge will guard our experience by protecting us from false influences. But our knowledge was never intended to supplant our experience.
We must possess both the knowledge of the Word of God, and personal fellowship with the God of the Word. Those who have knowledge without experience will be fruitless and dry, their lives satisfying to neither themselves nor God. But those who seek only experience without the Word, often end up in a state of vague disorientation, being led more by impulsive flights of fancy than by Divine inspiration. Let us have both knowledge and experience. Then our knowledge will lead us into true fellowship with God. In turn, our experience of God will lead us into a deeper understanding of His Word.
Here is the balance of the Christian life. The Word of God leads us to God, who in turn will reveal His Word to us, which points us again to Him and deepens our fellowship with Him. Thus we experience genuine spiritual growth and maturity. This is true knowledge and true experience. True knowledge of the Word will always lead us into personal experience of God; and true experience will always point us to, and be in accord with, the Word of God.
So we see that knowledge is to work in harmony with our personal experience of God. But our knowledge was never intended by God to be a substitute for our experience. We must not let it become this in our lives.