How well do you know your best friend, or even your spouse? Maybe you’ve been together for years and you think you know just about everything about them.
I have a close friend that I know very well. We’ve been through a lot together and relate to one another on a certain level. We have another mutual friend and when she joins us, it brings out a lightness and laughter from my first friend that I don’t always see. It’s a side of her personality that someone else brings out, and it helps me to know and appreciate her better.
In reading Tim Keller’s book “Prayer,” I was struck by this idea he introduced from C.S. Lewis. He explains there are parts of someone’s personality that may be brought out, not by you, but by someone else. If you want to truly know and enjoy a person more fully, you must see their interactions with others. This is true of God as well. While it’s important to have a close individual relationship, knowing God more completely happens best in community. “If it takes a community to know an ordinary human being, how much more necessary would it be to get to know Jesus alongside others?”
God is unchanging and His character remains firm. But He is so vast that we all see a slightly different facet of His majesty. Like the story of the blind men each describing the small area of elephant they were touching – the information needed to be put together to get the big picture.
I need you. I want to study God’s Word with you, pray with you, worship and fellowship with you. I know that you will help me see a side of God I wouldn’t if left completely to myself.
And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching. Hebrews 10:24-25
