Packer on Knowing God

this is an excerpt from J. I. Packer's book Knowing God...

I walked in the sunshine with a scholar who had effectively forfeited his prospects of academic advancement by clashing with church dignitaries over the gospel of grace. 'But it doesn't matter,' he said..., 'for I have known God and they haven't.' This remark was a mere parenthesis, a passing comment on something I had said, but it has stuck with me, and set me thinking.

Not many of us, I think, would ever naturally say that we have known God. The words imply a definiteness and matter-of-fact-ness of experience to which most of us, if we are honest, have to admit that we are still strangers. We claim, perhaps, to have a testimony, ...we say that we know God--this, after all, is what evangelicals are expected to say; but would it occur to us to say, without hesitation, and with reference to particular events in our personal history, that we have known God?...

I think, [rather, that] many of us [would never] naturally say (in the light of the knowledge of God which we have come to enjoy) that past dissappointments and present heartbreaks...don't matter. For the plain fact is that...they do matter. ...Constantly we find ourselves slipping into bitterness and apathy and gloom as we reflect on them, which we frequently do. The attitude we show to the world is a sort of dried-up stoicism, miles removed from the 'joy unspeakable and full of glory' which Peter took for granted that his readers were displaying (1 Peter 1:8).

...But...those who really know God...never brood on might-have-beens; they never think of the things they have missed, only of what they have gained. 'What things were gain to me, these have I counted loss for Christ,' wrote Paul. 'Yea verily, and I count all things to be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as dung, that I may gain Christ, and be found in Him...that I may know Him...' (Phil. 3:7-10) When Paul says he counts the things he lost 'dung', he means not merely that he does not think of them as having any value, but also that he does not live with them constantly in his mind: what normal person spends his time nostalgically dreaming of manure? Yet this, in effect, is what many of us do. It shows how little we have in the way of true knowledge of God.

We need frankly to face ourselves at this point. ...We can [perhaps] state the gospel clearly...If anyone asks us how men may know God, we can at once produce the right formula...Yet the joy, goodness, and unfetteredness of spirit which are the marks of those who have known God are rare among us--rarer, perhaps, than they are in some other Christian circles, where, by comparison, evangelical truth is less clearly and fully known. Here, too, it would seem that the last may prove to be first, and the first last. A little knowledge of God is worth more than a great deal of knowledge about Him.

As Christians, do we know God? Do we seek to know Christ? Can we say, unhesitatingly, that we have known Him? And do the attitudes, actions and emotions that characterize our lives PROVE that we do truly know Christ?