How To Know God

We are not the first people to ask "How can a person know God?"  But, how do we actually do it? 

Follow His Moral Commands

Perhaps the best way to begin to know God is by following His moral commands.  While I know that sounds a little odd, it actually makes sense if you understand where His moral commands come from - His own nature. 

God tells us to love one another, because God is loving.  God tells us to be fair and just, because God is fair and just.  Since God’s commands flow from His own nature, they give us a window into who He is.  And, when we practice this way of life, we experience the character of God. 

Even beyond that, though, adopting the way of life that God desires for us actually makes us more like Him.  Remember, these commands flow from God’s own nature, so as we become more loving, for example, we become more like God (with the obvious limitation that we never become God). 

Walk With Him

The process of knowing someone better as you spend time with him or her works for all types of relationships, whether the other person is a friend, family member, significant other, or God.  As time progresses and you interact more and more, you get to know the other person better.  Just like we get to know other humans better as we spend time with them doing things and living life together, so we get to know God better as we do things together. 

The New Testament regularly says that Christ works through believers.  And, since Christ is the way that we know God, then as Christ works through us, we are spending more time getting to know God. 

Study What Others Have Written Or Said

We are not the first people in history who have tried to know God.  Study gives us windows into how others have known God in the past, and we can benefit from the experiences of those who have gone before us. 

Even if we were to say that knowing God is only an experiential thing, is it not true that others have had experiences of God?  Why not learn from their experiences?  Perhaps, they found something we haven’t or present a different perspective that helps us see things more clearly. 

What we see in all three of these methods is that knowing God is an active process.  Unless you put something into it, nothing is going to come out of it.  Much like sitting on our couches will not get us in shape, waiting for knowledge of God is not going to produce results.  We need to follow His moral commands, walk with Him, and study what others have written.