Knowing God

Most of the people I know are on a diet, which shouldn't be surprising. I've read that some 61 percent of adults are on a diet at any given time, with nearly 1 in 5 dieting constantly. We spend some $35 billion a year on diet products, and I recently saw that three of the top 20 books on Amazon.com were diet books.

Oddly, we don't lose weight. About 98 percent of us gain back all we lose from dieting. Some 90 percent gain back more! It could be that we know what to do (eat less), but just don't do it. Clearly, if weight loss could be found in a book, we'd all be thin.

I notice a similar phenomenon in spiritual life, in which we seek the answer to our problems in best-selling books. In particular, we seem obsessed with books about finding God's blessing and our purpose. If the numbers are right, we've consumed over 40 million copies of such books in the last decade.

So why do so many of us continue feel unsure that our lives are not exactly on track or that we've discovered our purpose? As with dieting, it could be that what we need isn't found in a book. Not the books we're reading, anyway. What we need is to know God.

Ahh, but how to do that?

A.W. Tozer, a spiritual giant of the last century who wrote such classic books as The Pursuit of God, said this about knowing God: "The Word of God well understood and religiously obeyed is the shortest route to spiritual perfection. And we must not select a few favorite passages to the exclusion of others. Nothing less than a whole Bible can make a whole Christian."

In other words, if you would know God, know his Word. God wrote a book, so read it.

Oddly, the best-selling book of all time, the Bible, may be the least read. I've seen stats saying that 93 percent of households contain a Bible, and the average number of Bibles per home is three. Everybody who wants a Bible has one. Yet we spend a good deal of our time doing other things in an effort to know God, besides reading Scripture.

As both an author and publisher of Christian literature, I've got no beef with reading things other than the Bible. Your reading habits pay a lot of the bills around here. Yet we have neglected what Abraham Lincoln called "the best book God has given" to us.

Scripture--along with prayer and corporate worship--forms one leg of the iron triangle of spiritual formation. You cannot know God without knowing his Word.

When was the last time you read it?