Pressing To Know Him

This is a bit strange isn't it? Some of you have never received an email from me before. I will be to the point. This coming year some of us are planning to read through the whole Bible. In one year, that's right. That requires around 3 to 4 chapters per day. Some of you have read your Bibles through many times, others have never read it all the way through. Some of us, like me, are in the middle. In my experience nothing has fed my spirit more or more truly than reading through my Bible coupled with prayer. And that is the testimony of others as well. So I am welcoming you to join us (yes, a few have already said they would). It is not something that is for a particular local church; it is for personal growth and growth among us. Accountability will be greater if we do it together. And spiritual conversations will arise because we are reading common things in the Word of God. But I will give you an even greater reason, the best of reasons.

It is the knowledge of God. To know Him is what eternal life is all about. It is what we were made for!

"And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent." John 17:3

Jeremiah 9:23-24 Thus says the Lord: "Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the Lord."

What have we to be most grateful for and encouraged to tell other people about?! It is that we, who were once not a people, have become the people of the Living God! Lovers of sin as we all were and desparately guilty, the Bible says this: Proverbs 17:15 "He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous, are both alike an abomination to the Lord." Yet He has justified us. How can a holy God justify wicked men? That would be an abomination to Him. What does the God in Isaiah 6 have in common with sinners in Romans 3?

Yet it is true that: "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins" (Romans 3:23-25). He was vindicated in doing the abominable thing of justifying us, only by the sacrifice of His own Son! That is a God that I want to know! And what better, or rather what other, way to get to know God than the book that He wrote about Himself? He did give it to us for a reason, yes? Let us take advantage of it. I hope you all will.

your servant for Jesus sake,

Charlie Jackson

"Let us know; let us press on to know the Lord;
his going out is sure as the dawn;
he will come to us as the showers,
as the spring rains that water the earth."
Hosea 6:3