This post is from a larger series under the cat­e­gory Friend to Jesus. It is a detailed explo­ration of the three stages of faith: the believer, the ser­vant and the friend of God. If you want to start at the begin­ning, it begins with the post How Look­ing at a Car­avag­gio Paint­ing Can Change Your Life and then con­tin­ues chronologically.

Every­thing you want in life is right out­side your com­fort zone. Robert Allen

I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to expe­ri­ence pain; and never shut myself up in a numb core of non-feeling, or stop ques­tion­ing and crit­i­ciz­ing life and take the easy way out. To learn and think: to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new under­stand­ing, and new love. Sylvia Plath

God draws, but He draws the will­ing one. John Chrysostom

As I thought about this woman that I men­tioned in the pre­vi­ous post, it dawned on me just how imper­a­tive it is to con­tin­u­ally pur­sue God. As an exam­ple of this, I know of some­one who recently has walked away from their faith. This was a per­son who some years back was serv­ing and liv­ing a life that was exem­plary when it came to being a Chris­t­ian. How­ever, over the last cou­ple of years, I began to see that this life began to wane and he did not take his rela­tion­ship with God very seri­ously over these last years. Slowly over time, it began to show, and not only with the obvi­ous out­ward signs. Sadly, since that time, he has made many poor deci­sions, which has not only impacted him neg­a­tively, but his fam­ily as well. It’s been a lit­tle bit like watch­ing a train wreck.

Of late, I have been think­ing about how unhealthy it can be to not have Jesus at the cen­ter of your life on a daily basis. Yet this hap­pens all the time. In gen­eral, the church today places such empha­sis on evan­ge­lism, “get­ting peo­ple saved and into heaven,” but focuses too lit­tle on discipleship—learning how to live a life with Jesus. The Barna Group has some stag­ger­ing sta­tis­tics, con­firm­ing the fact that the church is good at “mak­ing con­verts, but not disciples:”

• In a recent study, when Chris­t­ian adults were asked to iden­tify their most impor­tant goal for their life, not a sin­gle per­son said it was to be a com­mit­ted fol­lower of Jesus Christ.
• Less than one out of every five born again adults had any spe­cific and mea­sur­able goals related to their per­sonal spir­i­tual development.
• Less than 1% of all Chris­tians per­ceived a con­nec­tion between their efforts to wor­ship God and their devel­op­ment as a dis­ci­ple of Jesus.
• The most widely-known Bible verse among adult and teen Chris­tians is “God helps those who help themselves”—which is not actu­ally in the Bible, and con­flicts with the basic mes­sage of Scripture.

Liv­ing with Jesus every day—this is really where life begins, not when you say the sinner’s prayer. Life is always con­tin­u­ing and we need to move with it. How­ever, too often in Chris­t­ian cir­cles, being reflec­tive and delib­er­ate about our rela­tion­ship with God is put to the side. For what­ever rea­son, peo­ple tend to stag­nate rather than thrive after mak­ing a com­mit­ment of faith. Ques­tions don’t get asked. Masks begin to be worn. We play the part, but in real­ity, we don’t know how to gen­uinely be in friend­ship with God. Liv­ing the Chris­t­ian life and going through the motions is easy, being in rela­tion­ship with Jesus is a whole dif­fer­ent mat­ter. This is what he was talk­ing about when he told the para­ble about build­ing your life on the sand—that it was unsafe to build on some­thing that is temporary.

After becom­ing a Chris­t­ian, I learned an impor­tant lesson—if you have any amount of bib­li­cal knowl­edge, watch out. You even­tu­ally will become the expert, the guru. Peo­ple will per­ceive that you have it all together, look up to you, and believe that you and God must be best buds. But all of this can be dan­ger­ous, because it can per­pet­u­ate a seri­ous problem—you will begin to learn how to live an inau­then­tic life; you will learn how to fake it. In the end, you will paint your­self  into a cor­ner to which there is no escape. Because you have played the role of the well-behaved church­goer, you won’t know how to play any other part. Sadly, I know this from first-hand expe­ri­ence from years past.

But reli­gious knowl­edge is never the stan­dard for hav­ing a rela­tion­ship with God and too often in the church, this is what we empha­size. It’s easy to know a lot about some­one; it’s a whole new thing to know some­one. This makes sense—it’s much more easy and com­fort­able to just know about some­one, sim­ply know­ing the facts (e.g., “she works at a hos­pi­tal, likes to eat sal­ads at lunch, has three kids, and dri­ves a white Toy­ota Sienna.”). There’s dis­tance and safety and very lit­tle mess. But know­ing just the facts about some­one does not mean you know them. Lots of us know a lot of stuff about a whole bunch of peo­ple, but it goes about as far as that. Our knowl­edge is a mile wide, but an inch deep. For some, it can be rare that they have gen­uinely deep and strong friendships. They keep peo­ple at bay, at a safe dis­tance and they don’t go too deep. We can also do the same with God.

But we need to move beyond just know­ing about God—we need to push to know him per­son­ally. John Wes­ley once wrote, “Once in seven years I burn all my ser­mons; for it is a shame, if I can­not write bet­ter ser­mons now than I did seven years ago.” In that state­ment, Wes­ley was say­ing that it was not a good thing if he hadn’t grown beyond where he once stood in terms of know­ing God. We need to keep mov­ing on as well, being rest­less and ask­ing for more. This should be our end goal. I think C.S. Lewis said it in the most direct way possible:

Every time you make a choice, you are turn­ing the cen­tral part of you, the part of you that chooses, into some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent from what it was before. And, tak­ing your life as a whole, with all your innu­mer­able choices, all your life long you are slowly turn­ing this cen­tral thing either into a Heaven crea­ture or into a hell­ish creature—either into a crea­ture that is in har­mony with God, and with other crea­tures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fel­low crea­tures and with itself.

Those are strong and dif­fi­cult words, but they are true. Yogi Berra said it in a sim­i­lar way, but in a way only he could: “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up some­where else.” As Chris­tians, we need to con­tin­u­ally change and grow and move beyond just know­ing about God and gen­uinely encounter him. At the end of the day, we need to know where we are headed.