Being Known

I’m reading Knowing God by JI Packer right now. This is the first time I have ever read this book, and I’m not sure why. It’s like tasting chocolate for the first time at age 30, loving it, and wondering why you’ve never had it before – and being a little upset about having missed out on it some 30 years past. It’s like that for me with this book, only to a greater degree – God is far better than mere chocolate.

So I wanted to share a section of the chapter titled Knowing and Being Known:

“What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it – the fact that he knows me. I am graven on the palms of his hands. I am never out of his mind. All my knowledge of him depends on his sustained initiative in knowing me. I know him because he first knew me, and continues to know me. He knows me as a friend, one who loves me; and there is no moment when his eye is off me, or his attention distracted from me, and no moment, therefore, when his care falters.

This is momentous knowledge. There is unspeakable comfort – the sort of comfort that energizes, be it said, not enervates – in knowing that God is constantly taking knowledge of me in love and watching over me for my good….”

And to rid us of our condemning thoughts of our sins keeping us from God’s love today, Packer then says:

“There is tremendous relief in knowing that his love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion him about me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench his determination to bless me.”