S23P11 – The abundant life: knowledge
Rom. 12:1-2
Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
As a child, I was pretty insecure. I didn’t have cool clothes, wasn’t good at sports and pretty much scared away all the girls. However, it didn’t take me very long to realize the one good quality that people always seemed to notice about me. I was a really smart kid. My brain was what I had to stand out from the crowd and get the attention that I craved. Anyone who knew me as a child could tell you that I often wanted to share the new things I learned to show just how smart I was. For me, knowledge was a commodity. It was the one thing that I knew I had in abundance, but it was only man’s knowledge that I had. If we are to chase an abundance of knowledge, it should be the great knowledge that God promises is available to those who follow him faithfully.
When we come to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, we start to gain all kinds of incredible knowledge that God has. He lets us in on his great plan for mankind and reveals it to us through the scriptures and through our walk with him. We start to gain an intimate knowledge of our heavenly father, and we start to recognize more clearly those things that are of him. In the scripture above, Paul says that it is possible for us to know the will of God. This is a promise that we cannot simply gloss over and then move to the next point. We must meditate on the great thing that God makes available to us, that we can know all that He desires us to do in this life. That is incredible knowledge, to spend our days walking in accordance with the will of God in all things. To have a knowledge of God that is so intimate and so clear should be the aim of every believer.
When we find ourselves thirsting for knowledge, let us thirst for the abundant knowledge that God makes available in himself. There are many things that we can come to know through years of hard work and study, but many of those things will simply pass away along with this world and this order of things. We have access to an abundant and eternal knowledge. We mortal humans can grow to know the will of our perfect Father in heaven. The value in that knowledge surpasses the value in everything else one could possibly know. Father, give us a thirst to know You as fully as we are able, and make that thirst grow and grow as we learn more and more what your will is.