to know

About 8 months ago, TJ was looking for something to listen to while he was at work, and he happened to find The Village Church podcast. Since then, God has used so many of these sermons to speak directly into my life. I was listening to this one today, and Pastor Matt Chandler addressed one of my biggest heart issues right now. His words are much more eloquent then mine, so I'm going to just copy down an excerpt from that sermon. If you get a chance, listen to the whole thing. 

"Now, spoken and unspoken, churches have this kind of unwritten code of Christian behavior...In fact, depending on the time of life that you get saved, the list looks different. Like if you got saved when you were in college, your heart was awakened to the reality of Christ in college, all of a sudden, you have to start playing the acoustic guitar. Because you can't be a Christian and not play the acoustic guitar in college, that's for sure. And you have to join a worship band or you start reading John Piper's books, and you've go to go here, and you've got to do that. And you start filling out that list. Now when you're older, it looks a little bit different. You know, you're Republican, you've got to fight this moral quandary that our nation is in, as we as Christians are hard pressed. And by the way, if you'd like to fly to Leberia or China, I'll pay for you to go, and then you can see what hard pressed is. And then you've got a checklist, you've got to study this, you've got to join this, you've got to go here, you can't do this, you better start doing this... Here's my point: what ends up happening is we begin, whether spoken or unspoken, to try to conform to this list of expectations on Christian behavior. We begin to work towards it and begin to master it, and where we can't master it, we begin to pretend to master it. And what ends up happening is we grow more and more and more in the knowledge about God and wake up and can't find Him anywhere. So that, what ends up happening is our knowledge about God has increased monumentally over that moment where He became real to us, but Jesus is nowhere to be found. Jesus is nowhere to be found."

One of the most haunting parts of scripture to me is Matthew 7:21-23 

"Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom  of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, drive out demons and perform many miracles?' Then I will tell them plainly, 'I never knew you. Away from me you evildoers!'  (bold lettering added) 

And then I look back on all my years of religion classes, sunday school, church, chapels, devotions, and I have to seriously wonder if I just know about God, or do I actually know Him.