You are never going to be able to exhaust the Lord Jesus Christ in any conversation, any declaration, any form of teaching or preaching, or even in the heavens. If you combined the knowledge of God possessed by all human beings, all angels, all Holy Ones, all Seraphim and Cherubim, and every created being and compared it to what is still to be known of God, it would not register on the scale. It would not even move the arrow. If you went into the future 25 trillion years and collected all the knowledge of the Lord that will be unveiled, it still would not move the arrow on the scale.
He is past finding out, but He wants us to know Him. That is a relationship, not an accumulation of knowledge. That’s the problem with the arrow. We think knowing God is an accumulation of knowledge. It is not; it is only the relationship of Him in us. It’s Him coming to His fullness, not me coming to information. In fact, the reverse is true. Gathering information and knowledge about God actually moves the arrow backwards. Information has nothing to do with knowing the Lord.
The church has accumulated all these facts about God. None of them are true because truth is not information. Truth is life based. Unless we know Him as Life, we do not know Him, no matter what information we have. It was never the will of God that any created being know the first bit of information about Him outside of a relationship with him. Why do you think it was called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Knowledge makes us prideful, as the scriptures say. Love builds.
Information is presently the bane of the church. We live in an information generation where so much is accessible on a computer and on the Internet, but none of that has any bearing on knowing the Lord. Relationship with Jesus does not come through anyone else to us. It does not matter how much we like and honor men and women of God who have gone before us; our relationship is not built by them but by the Spirit. Your relationship with God, just like my relationship with God, is not built by feeding off of one another. It comes only by feeding on Jesus. You know what He said about it, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves” (John 6:53).
It is not that we can’t or shouldn’t listen to one another. We should. It is not that we shouldn’t hear those who have preceded us. We should. I love history, including spiritual history. Honor those men and women who have known the Lord, but spirituality does not come through osmosis. Spirituality only comes through the person of Christ, not through our brothers and sisters. Past, present, or future, it only comes through knowing the Lord, not doctrines, not going to church, not any of that. None of that will help us if we do not personally engage with the Lord. That is true individually and corporately.
God at times takes us through a weaning process. He weans us from things that have their hooks in us, including other people or our favorite preachers, book writers, and so on. If He does that, it is with an intent to keep the gulf between Him and everything else in place and intact. He is the source of life alone, and there is no other. He is the source.
Never allow yourself to become a false deity by being a source to other people. Thank God there are men and women who have walked that life in reality. We should be able to see that they are examples but not the source. An example is no good unless it leads us to the source. If our examples are not leading people to Christ then we become false deities quickly. Do you want to be someone’s counterfeit? Do you want to be anti-Christ? Do you want to be someone’s substitute for God? It can feel good, and therein is the great trap—how it feels. But are we really helping people if we are not getting them out to the Lord?
It feels good to have people like you. It feels good to have people want you. It sure feels a lot better than people hating you, but in the long run, both are meaningless. Neither will get the job done. It needs to be taken outside of man, outside of our scope. Christ must be revealed in me and in you. Anything less is counterfeit Christianity.