GOD KNOWS YOU!


Today, November 22, is mostly remembered for the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. Did you know that it was also on this date that C.S. Lewis died? At 5:30 p.m. (in England) at The Kilns, one week short of his 65th birthday. No doubt Lewis’s death was overshadowed by the Kennedy tragedy, but I’ve always wondered if more would’ve been made in the news about the death of C.S. Lewis if it hadn’t been for Kennedy’s assassination.

I bring all of this up today: 1) because it is the 48th anniversary of C.S. Lewis’s passing, 2) because of the selection I read this morning in a devotional I’m using again this year based on quotes from Lewis’s classic works, and 3) because it beautifully highlights something I shared with my high school small group on Sunday afternoon. I find it amusing that all of these elements came together today! Once again, “Surprise, surprise, God is a surprise!” (Carey Landry’s marvelous lyric from his album, “Bloom Where You Are Planted.”)

I was sharing with the guys some reasons why I believe that Christianity IS the “true religion” (the “myth that is true,” as Lewis himself once put it). I pointed out to them the claim Christians have in Scripture that the God of the universe loves us and is reaching out to us, as opposed to other religions where it is all about humans reaching to God, trying to appease God, be good enough for God, etc. This is what makes Christianity unique, beautiful, amazing, almost unbelievable. It turns religion on its head – the way so many things we read in Scripture are turned upside down in God’s economy (the last shall be first, the older will serve the younger (Esau/Jacob), whoever loses his life (for Christ) will save it, etc.).


I tried to impress on these four high school guys how utterly fantastic this reality is: God love us and God is seeking us! It’s not about us being the center of things, our personal faith, our personal salvation, our attitude toward God – no! Instead, it begins with God. God knows us, loves us, and is reaching to us – first and foremost – so that we are known by God even before we ever know about Him! When people say that Christianity is all about “do’s and don’ts” and rules and regulations and limitations and “have to’s” and oughts and shoulds and boring rituals and learning about all sorts of irrelevant religious stuff…well, they are really missing the point. The majority of all this stuff is man-made, mostly; human attempts to control and manipulate both God and people, and not at all what the essence of Christian faith and truth is about. Christianity is “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son” and “While we were still sinners Christ died for us” and “Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O Lord.” Christianity is the beautiful reality of grace and forgiveness and a relationship with a loving God who desires us to call Him Father and Friend – even Abba (daddy!) – not a distant God who is unknowable, fickle, fearsome, and expects sacrifices to be made if you want things to go well in life (sort of a tit-for-tat, I’ll-scratch-your-back-if-you-scratch-mine situation).

How much more glorious and freeing and almost laughable is it that the Great God of All seeks us, reaches out to us, knows us – and wants so much for us to know and love Him in return. All we have to do is accept this gift from our loving, all-knowing Abba Father and respond appropriately and responsibly out of love and thanksgiving to this God who gives Himself to us. It’s not rules and regulations and expectations – no! It’s easy. Simply desiring to please the very One who first loved us. Expressing love in similar ways to how we show love to our spouses, our children, our parents, our friends: wanting to please them, spend time with them, give to them, respond to them, be there for them no matter what, with no strings attached. Seeking to do whatever will delight the object of our affections. It’s not hard! Challenging…yes – but not oppressive or drudgery or impossible to fulfill. It’s as simple as the way Jesus put it, in Matt. 22:37-39: “Love God and love others.” In this way we are known by God and we know Him!

Here is how Lewis puts it in his sermon, “The Weight of Glory,” first preached in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford on June 8, 1941:

Perhaps it seems rather crude to describe glory as the fact of being “noticed” by God. But this is almost the language of the New Testament. St. Paul promises to those who love God not (as we should expect) that they will know Him but that they will be known by Him (I Cor. 8:3). It is a strange promise. Does not God know all things at all times? But it is dreadfully re-echoed in another passage of the New Testament. There we are warned that it may happen to any one of us, to appear at last before the face of God and hear only the appalling words: “I NEVER KNEW YOU. DEPART FROM ME!” In some sense, as dark to the intellect as it is unendurable to the feelings, we can be both banished from the presence of Him who is present everywhere and erased from the knowledge of Him who knows all. We can be left utterly and absolutely OUTSIDE – repelled, exiled, estranged, finally and unspeakably ignored. On the other hand we can be called in, welcomed, received, acknowledged. We walk every day on the razor edge between these two incredible possibilities. Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia – our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off (to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside) is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honor beyond all our merits, and also the healing of that old ache.

When we are in an all-knowing relationship with God, we are united with that “something in the universe from which we now feel cut off.” To be known by God and to know Him – this is uniquely Christian. Best of all, we do not have to wait for it to happen in some future afterlife in heaven. We can live in the midst of it and live it out here and now, in the present, in the world as it is today. Wow! Such an incredible, loving reality that God gives to us right here, right now, in the present! We can choose to live on the positive side of that “razor sharp edge” and experience the reality of being “called in, welcomed, received, and acknowledged” by God right now, if we are simply willing to open ourselves to Him. He already knows us! Why hold back? This is life abundant.

My prayer is that I can help people grasp the beautiful reality of all of this more and more and better and better as I begin a new chapter in my ministry responsibilities here at Hilmar Covenant. Resources like C.S. Lewis and Oswald Chambers will be helpful in articulating what Scripture describes. I pray that You, O God, will go ahead of me and plant a hunger, a curiosity, and a longing in many from our congregation that I can follow up on, enter into a relationship with, and through the power of Your Holy Spirit awaken them to the delight of a loving, living, knowing relationship with You, the God of the universe who made Yourself most clearly seen in the person of Your Son, our Savior, Jesus. Amen!