The Cost To Know Him

“We are not good with You because we preach You, we are good with You because we know You.”

I served in a church for 7 years as the women’s minister. I left the organized church in 2019 bitter, hurt, angry, and frustrated. Nothing turned out like I expected. In fact, it seemed like everything had fallen apart. A year later, I graduated from Bible college with highest honors and I remember chuckling to myself, thinking, “All this for what, Lord?” I felt useless. Purposeless. But right around that time, I started to have an inexplicable urge to go out to my barn every day to pray. 

Day after day, I went out to that barn. I wrestled with a lot of things out there, but mostly with myself. More than once I lamented to God, “I worked so hard to do what You asked, and now all I’m doing is sitting in a dirty barn every day.” What I didn’t understand at the time, was that there is a difference between preaching Christ and knowing Christ. When I served in the church, I could preach Christ up one side of that barn and down another. But one day, God let all that come crashing down and called me out to a barn, because He wanted me to know Him. The truth was, the Lord wasn’t asking me to preach, He was asking me to be in relationship with Him. 

Throughout that year in the barn, I grew in personal knowledge of the living God. My religion met its maker, my Scripture knowledge met its inspirer. My failures became my salvation from both dead religion and the vanity of self-motivated service. When the Lord would share a particularly deep spiritual truth with me, I would write it on the barn wall. And one of those truths was a reminder to myself that we aren’t right with God because we preach Him, we’re right with God because we know Him. 

Oh Father, increase our desire to know You… and grant us the grace to be willing to pay the cost.

(Matt 16:24,25) Then Jesus said His to disciples, "If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.”

(Phil 3:10,11 AMP) For my determined purpose is that I may know Him ; that I may progressively become more deeply and intimately acquainted with Him, perceiving, recognizing and understanding the wonders of His Person more strongly and more clearly, and that I may in that same way come to know the power outflowing from His resurrection, which it exerts over believers, and that I may so share His sufferings as to be continually transformed in spirit into His likeness, even to His death, in the hope that if possible, I may attain to the spiritual and moral resurrection that lifts me out from among the dead even while in the body.

(Prov 2:3-5) …if you cry for discernment and raise your voice for understanding, if you seek it like silver and search it out like hidden treasure, then you will understand the fear of the LORD and find the knowledge of God.