How can we spot somebody who has a healthy relationship with God ?
How can we tell if somebody really knows God ?
[ People's answers: how they live their life; joy; humility; peace; transparency; self acceptance; passionate; radiant ]
All good answers. Let me give you the Bible's answer. Before I do that, we could have also added some more. You had much better answers than most groups would, I think. I expected to hear, "somebody who attends to the Bible." I mean, how do you know God, except in the Bible ? Except that the Pharisees knew the Bible really well and didn't know God, but never mind.
You're charismatic, so you think somebody who knows God is somebody who operates in spiritual gifts and prophesies. Somebody who can read God's thoughts and speak them to us must really know God, right ? These are all logical things, but here's the Bible's answer.
1 John 4:7 and following says, "Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. The person who loves is the person who knows God."
Think about the people who are in the leadership of the church who are arrogant, self-assured, spend a whole lot of time working on tightening up their doctrine, who would never do immoral, bad things that are trivial - drinking and stuff like that - but who you would never in a million years describe as people who love. You all know people like that.
If they don't love, they don't know God. This is the critical, defining symptom - somebody with a healthy relationship with God is somebody who manifests love to other people. The person who knows God is the person who loves.
Jesus was asked by somebody, "What matters most in the world ?" and Jesus said, "Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, and love your neighbour as yourself." Jesus was describing somebody who knows God. Again, we could move off in the wrong direction now by me exhorting you to love God better. "Spend more time loving God, you guys." So everybody goes out of here feeling all confused and wondering, "What do I do that I'm not already doing ?"
Let me tell you what to do that you're not already doing - and it's good news. It's all good news. Let me read the rest: "Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: he sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he first loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is made perfect in us."
So the key symptom of somebody who has a healthy relationship with God is somebody who loves and knows God. That person didn't learn to love and to know God through discipline or hard work - that person learned to know and love God by being loved by God.
The critical thing that you and I have to do, one way or another, is find ways, find environments, find techniques if you will, find people, find some way to be loved by God. I think that the greatest value of the various renewal things that come roaring through the church and confuse us and make us crazy is that it's God's attempt to break through, and it comes through in a weird, violent, chaotic way sometimes, because what he wants to do is to love us - to touch us. I think that we could have a whole lot more orderly renewal and revival and transformation of our society if we were just able to be easier for God to love.
I think that a lot of the stress and the strain on us is just God finding some way to get through and to love us, and some people have to take a trip to the carpet in order for that to happen. There's no virtue in that at all, it just happens to be that that might be one of the ways that it has to happen for people. He knocks them out on the carpet so that he can love them. And they could have got that just sitting in the corner at home.
1 Corinthians 13 is one of the tip offs to this, isn't it. "If I have everything going for me, if I can speak in the tongues of men and of angels, if I have the Bible memorised, if I do everything well, and I'm so virtuous I can even give my body to be burned and give everything away to the poor - I can do all that, but if I don't love, it's nothing."
Let me tell you something else. If you are not experiencing God's love for you, you won't be able to love, and your ministry amounts to nothing.
Paul had this one wired. Ephesians 3:14-19: "For this reason, I kneel before the Father, from whom his whole family in heaven and earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through the Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and how long and how high and how deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with the full measure of the fullness of God."
You get the full measure of the fullness of God, which is everything that you ever dreamed possible, and you get it through being loved by Jesus Christ. It was there all the time, just like a bomb ready to go off in our face. That's the key - it's being loved. It's nothing that we have to go out and do that brings us love, joy, peace and all those other things that you pointed out - those are symptoms of being known and loved by God. And being able to be loved enables us to love, and that's the demonstration that we know God.
That's it. And it's really democratic, because you don't have to be intelligent. You don't have to be a man. You don't have to be in leadership. You don't have to be anything. You don't have to be "somebody" in the institutional sense. Anybody can allow themselves to be loved by God, and because of that, be able to love others.
I can't send you to a book, because nobody's written a book on this. I can't send you to some technique to let yourself be loved by God. It's just something that you do. Maybe because I'm not good at it, I don't have a ready answer for that. Don't even ask me about that, because I don't have an answer for that.
And whatever you do, as pastors, don't go tinkering around in other people's lives unless you like them and love them. Unless you respect the God image in them, you'll do more damage than good.
Love is everything. And I'm so disappointed about that ! Because I'm good at everything else ! And this is the one thing that matters. A lot of people preach their pet theories and their hobby horses and stuff like that. This isn't something I gravitated towards naturally. This just points out my own weakness and my own brokenness and my own need. This is not a fun thing for me to talk about. Because it makes me look foolish, because we're talking about something that I just don't do very well.
Paul says, the very first thing you do is be rooted and grounded in love - that is the foundation of your Christian life. I had a dramatic, filthy beast becomes raving evangelist, overnight conversion in 1957, and for two years while I was in the army, which was when it happened - I had a foxhole conversion, it was during the whole Vietnam thing - I couldn't wait to get out of the army and to finish university and find a church to plug into so that these people who were professionals at this Christian thing could root me and ground me in the Christian faith.
And one of the very first things they did was to put me to work teaching the youth group. But I said, "Look, what do I do ? How do I build a foundation under this experience of God rescuing me ?" He rescued me from physical death, and I was half crazy with fear and anxiety, and he rescued me from that and gave me all these huge benefits. "What do I do now to do this whole Christian thing right ?"
They meant well, but they told me what you would have told me. Read you Bible, tithe, pray, have a quiet time, share your faith, attend services. These are all the things that you do to build a Christian foundation. Not once, not ever, did anybody say, "Kenny boy, the first thing that you do is you get rooted and grounded in love. That's your foundation." Despite the fact that you could hardly imagine more unambiguous language in the third chapter of Paul's letter to the Ephesians. You could hardly imagine clearer instructions on what we do to build a foundation for our lives. "Be rooted and grounded first of all in God's love."
You can't love unless you are loved. You can't love yourself, and you can't love others. That's the key - you can't love God unless he loves you, you can't love yourself and love others unless he loves you and you have an experience of that love. I'm not talking about some abstract thing, "Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so" - you've got to have something a little more than words on a page. It has to be an experience.
There has to be an experience that we open ourselves up to somehow, and cultivate somehow. Not once did any of the elder statesmen say this - they gave me books, in fact, and then I went out and bought a whole bunch more. "Handbook for new believers." It was a list of things I had to do. Nothing about God. And because I was this brand new Christian and my theological education had been the New Testament, C. S. Lewis and A. W. Tozer, and I didn't know anything about anything, I just took their word for it.
I read books - the shortest list was eight, the biggest list was fifteen things you have to do now that you are a Christian. I love Billy Graham, but go to one of his crusades, and they'll give you a book - here's what you do now that you came forward and took Jesus as your personal Saviour. Read your Bible, witness, get into fellowship, tithe, blah blah blah.
All good things - I do them all, and I encourage you to do them all. But it's not the foundation. It's just bits and pieces of the structure that you put on top of the foundation. The foundation is a sensation of being loved by the Father.
After I graduated from university, I was headed towards business, and I got a call - what can I say. It became pretty clear to me that the thing I enjoyed most was knowing God and helping other people get to know God, and that meant some form of ministry or a missionary or something. The thought at the time didn't appeal to me, and quite frankly it appeals to me even less thirty years later. But that just seemed to be the thing that I should do.
And so I started asking people, I started asking ministers, "It looks like I'm going to head towards seminary, it looks like I'm going to be a minister or a missionary or something. So what do I do ?"
Do you know what I heard ? "You need to learn how to preach. You need to learn how to teach. You need to learn how to counsel. You need to learn how to administrate." I was given all kinds of really good, sincere instructions from my elders in the ministry about building a foundation for ministry.
But not once, not ever, did anybody say, "Kenny boy, the first thing you've got to do is be rooted and grounded in God's love, because you're going to be lethal if you don't. You're going to burn out and blow up, and you're going to do people more damage than good, with your energy and your mind, unless you're rooted and grounded in God's love. Unless you know his love for you, you're going to always be crazy, and you're never going to make it."
The complete talk this was extracted from