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| Central Kenya - in the Rift Valley area |
A constant prayer of mine is: "God, raise my level of experience to the experiential realities recorded in the Bible." This is why, at Redeemer, we continue preaching through the biblical text, with much joy and expectation.
If we only read the biblical text as a book of doctrine, or a book containing abstract truths about God, then we might search forever yet despair of actually knowing God and hearing God's voice. Experience, not theory or abstractions, breeds conviction.
In his book Hearing God Dallas Willard writes of the importance of reading Scripture "on the assumption that the experiences recorded there are basically of the same type as ours would have been if we had been there." (p. 44) In regard to this Willard quotes A.W. Tozer, who writes that...
... "it is altogether possible to be instructed in the rudiments of the faith and still have no real understanding of the whole thing. And it is possible to go on to become expert in Bible doctrine and not have spiritual illumination, with the result that a veil remains over the mind, preventing it from apprehending the truth in its spiritual essence." (In Willard, 45)
Expect to know God by experience.
