Is Direct Experience With God Important?
Direct Experience
True Knowledge Of God Comes From Experience
True understanding of God comes from experience. This is something that people have gotten wrong for much of the New Testament. The knowledge of good hurts the Body of Christ immeasurably. Many times, personal spiritual experience comes to us through visions, dreams, and personal visitations. Likewise, almost all scripture originates through actual contact with our Father. Only after God speaks, do believers write it down as scripture.
To actually know someone, you first must experience them. People can’t fully know anybody through second-hand means. Testimonies, letters, photos, and mementos only serve to give a two-dimensional knowledge of a three-dimensional person. As good as a photographs might be, they always pale in comparison to actually being there.
Facts and figures do not a relationship make
Many people know a lot of facts about God, but few ever meet Him. People simply cannot know YHWH through theoretical knowledge. Things, immediately apparent when face to face, are opaque without direct personal contact.
Losing faith in Bible College
I experienced this during Bible College. The more I learned about God the less I felt I knew Him. I learned doctrine, yet could not seem to find His presence. Finally, and mercifully, God came to our church and I personally experienced Him. Suddenly, I understood my intellectual picture of my Father was incorrect. Through personal contact I finally understood how He really loved me. After meeting God through experience, scriptures began to make better sense. All of the Bible is true, but what “I” had mistakenly thought the Bible said, lacked perspective. It took meeting God to straighten things out in my mind.
We must experience God to truly know Him
Learning about God is not enough, we must actually meet God and be in His presence to gain real understanding. Those who try to teach the scriptures without meeting the One who wrote them, portray a limited and often skewed view of God. When people assume that incorrect knowledge equals truth, they pick up the limitations of others. As this chain of misfortune continues, everyone loses touch with God. It is like trying to figure out how many teeth a horse has without examining the horse’s mouth. First hand experience is necessary to know the Truth.
When we are far from God, He seems strange to us
Relationship based believers say , “this is how God really is”. Doctrine based believers say, I cannot accept what I cannot understand. Experiential Christianity seems strange and out-of-place to doctrine based Christians. When reports of actual experiences don’t match doctrine, many Christians automatically reject the experience. For example, some people do this when confronted with the reality of speaking in other tongues. Their established doctrine says that tongues have ceased. Therefore, in their minds, if someone testifies of speaking in a heavenly language it cannot be of God. Legalistic people allow their misunderstanding of scripture to actually cause them to reject the gift of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, dogmatists despise the gift of God, because their intellectual Christianity declares it cannot not exist.
God wants to meet you
In conclusion, leave arm-chair Christianity behind and press towards knowing our Lord through experiencing Him. Come to understand what God speaks through personal contact. The Spirit and the Word agree, working together in us to know God fully. Replace your theoretical knowledge with actual supernatural contact. Believers become one with each another through shared personal experience of one God. Once this happens, the unity of the Spirit naturally leads us all to a unity of faith.