It is clear that we can have faith in God, but then miss the point entirely. Think about it this way: at one point in the gospels, Jesus speaks some really daunt­ing and ear-catching words. He said that there will come a day when stand­ing before him at the judg­ment there will be those who will say that they did this and that in his name. They will tell him they’ve cast out a bunch of demons, healed a bunch of peo­ple, led mul­ti­tudes to him­self, even were pastors—basically did all these great works for God. They’ll be exclaim­ing, look at what I did Jesus, aren’t you proud of me! How­ever, he will sim­ply will come back and state, I never knew you. (Matthew 7:21–23) Whoah! Once again, it’s Jesus turn­ing things on its head—addressing some­thing from a dif­fer­ent angle. What we think is true, may not nec­es­sar­ily be the case. With this story, we see that there will be a lot of peo­ple who are doing these great “works” for God, but in the end, these folks will turn out to be essen­tially frauds. Jesus pin­points where they lack—they lacked a rela­tion­ship with Him. He sim­ply says this: I never knew you. That verse is intim­i­dat­ing and thought-provoking, because it lets me know that it might not be nec­es­sar­ily impor­tant that I know Jesus, but most impor­tantly that he knows me.

But with that above verse, does Jesus know me, what does that mean on a day-to-day basis. Today, churches empha­size that we need to “know Jesus,” but how does it work for him to know us? First, think about this in terms of rela­tion­ships. With rela­tion­ships, one can stay on the periph­ery or you can enter into the expe­ri­ence of the friend­ship. You can know only the facts about some­one and yet miss the essen­tials of the per­son. You can allow your­self to enter into the rela­tion­ship or be held back. Think of it this way—I can know a whole lot about a per­son, but not really know the per­son at all.

I will give you an exam­ple of some­one I know; I’ve known him for about three years. I know that he dri­ves a Ford Fusion, has dark hair, likes to eat Mex­i­can food at least once a week, has been mar­ried for twelve years, has a kid who is in first grade, roots for the Michi­gan State Spar­tans dur­ing March Mad­ness, works in the account­ing field. This is the first level of know­ing some­one. You get the facts. At a deeper level, I don’t know much more about him, even though I have known him for nearly three years. For exam­ple, in terms of Know­ing this per­son: I think he is a good father, I think he has a decent mar­riage; and I think he is a Chris­t­ian. The prob­lem is—this is how close we have become, or bet­ter yet, how close, he has become to me. I really don’t know him at all. For the most part he has only given me so much, and that has not been much at all. For all intents and pur­poses, even though I see him on a fairly con­sis­tent basis, we are acquain­tances and not friends. On the flip side, I have opened up to him a lit­tle bit about myself. I have shared beyond the facts and shared with him some of my more per­sonal stuff in an attempt to deepen our friend­ship. To put it sim­ply, He knows me; but I don’t know him. I think this is what Jesus is try­ing to get at with that pas­sage. We can know a lot about him, but not really know him. We can engage reg­u­larly with him (i.e., go to church every Sun­day or read our Bible daily), but never vul­ner­a­bly open up our life to him. I think what Jesus was get­ting at in this pas­sage is that folks like these hold back a sub­stan­tial part of them­selves from God.

Here are some ques­tions you may have to ask your­self. Ask your­self: are you sim­ply acquainted with Jesus or do you gen­uinely know him? Are you sim­ply fol­low­ing some of the rudi­men­tary rules of being a Chris­t­ian or are you actu­ally engag­ing the liv­ing God? As the exam­ple I used above, do you just know a lot of stuff about God, but really don’t know him very much at all? If this is the case, mov­ing beyond just know­ing Jesus, how can you let him know you? How can you bet­ter open up your life to him?

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