Knowing God Takes Time

“God, however, cannot be downloaded as can the reams of information we have at our fingertips from the Internet. Acquiring information is one thing. Understanding it is another. Learning to become wise by incorporating that information into a framework of understanding, and doing so before God, is yet something else. This, like many other things of value in life, takes time. There are no shortcuts here. Instantaneous knowledge from the Internet is one thing. Learning to know God is quite different. The knowledge of God is, in fact, a lifetime pursuit, not some instantaneous download. God has made himself known in Scripture, but we need to learn how to walk with him through life in the light of what we known of him. This journey never ends until, like Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress, we finally cross the great river and are welcome to the shores of eternity and the presence of God . Can we, then, set aside the impatience that the Internet tends to breed, and the habits of being distracted which our highly compacted modern lives create, in order to focus on what really matters?

“I am confident we can.”

David Wells, God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-love of God Reorients Our World (Wheaton: Crossway, 2014), 38.