We are meant to know God like an intimate conversation—we’re invited to the table (Psalm 23), and we get to sit and eat with God. That’s one of the patterns of the scriptures celebrated and experienced week by week as we eat the Lord’s Supper. God has made all the first moves, and we’re invited to an ever deepening knowing. We will know God and be known by him.

How does someone know that you love them? My wife knows that I love her. She can remember that I swore vows to do so, she can remember all the times that I’ve said so before, she can watch my behaviour both past and present and see that it must be true. She knows that I love her. But, if that was it, she knew because she could figure it out, I imagine she wouldn’t feel loved.

Feeling loved is more than knowing it’s true, it’s experiencing something that demonstrates it. It’s one thing to logically deduce that you’re loved, another to receive gifts, or words, or affection, or time, or help that shows that someone loves you, cares for you, and takes the time to think about what makes you happy.

Only knowing you’re loved would make sustaining a marriage through all the buffets of life a real challenge.

It’s the same with God. We can know he loves us because we can deduce it, but it’s quite something else to feel loved. For that we need to experience something that demonstrates it. To be sustained by the love of God through all the buffets of life, we need to move from knowing to feeling.

Which sounds backwards, we all know that knowing would be better than feeling—of course if we take a step back, both are kinds of knowledge and could both be called knowing. By ‘feeling’ here I mean the difference between deduction and direct experience.

When life knocks us for six, how do you find the strength to stand up again? A theological knowledge that there is hope beyond the veil? That’s a great start, but we need both a knowing of hope and a feeling of joy. The feeling lets us know, deep down in our bones, that the knowing of hope is a true knowing. Joy lets us know that hope isn’t abstract and alien, but familial. Joy lets me know that hope is for me.

I could learn something about you by looking at you, and I could probably learn a lot more about you by asking other people who do know you about you. Then I would be in the (I’m sure) pleasant position of knowing lots about you. I might even have a reasonable idea what knowing you would be like, but I wouldn’t actually know you.

The only way I can know you is by speaking to you, and even then I can only know you as much as you allow.

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