Know God intimately

Saturday August 28, 2021

Know God intimately

“Thus will I know Christ, the power of His resurrection and fellowship in His sufferings by becoming conformed to Him in His death.” Philippians 3.10

Fascinating is the description that Luke gives us of Anne, this old woman who recognized Christ in the child that Her parents had just brought to Jerusalem : “There was a prophetess, Anne, daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Aser. She was of a very advanced age. She had only lived 7 years with her husband after her marriage. Widowed and 84 years old, she never left the temple; she served God night and day in fasting and prayer. Also arriving at the same time, she publicly expressed her gratitude to God and spoke of Jesus to all those who awaited deliverance in Jerusalem” (Luke 2.36-38). Anne had never put an end to her quest for God ! What an example and what a challenge for all of us whose spiritual development has been put on hold long ago ! The reserves of enthusiasm and spiritual zeal which they were able to accumulate in the past have gradually dried up and they survive in the memory of a faith now sterile and without a future, which no longer makes any impression on people who around them and trying to overcome real world problems. Oswald Chambers once wrote this sentence in his diary : “A great fear has come over me recently, a fear that forced me to kneel on the spot in prayer before God. That day I met a man whom I had known many years before, a man of God who had greatly impressed me. Today I saw nothing but a talkative and vain man, a man who had nothing more important to say and who clung to an empty and futile image of his past. Talkative, like a man who has nothing more to say, but likes to talk indiscriminately. Vain like a man whose mind has dried up from lack of exercise and who is only waiting for death to put an end to his downfall." But you can still escape this slow death : the rest of your life can contain your best years, as long as you really care about getting to know God intimately like Anne did !

Source (His Word for Today)