"Need To Know"

One of the most beautiful things about relationship with God through the Lord Jesus Christ involves the mystery of it. Certainly we can know enough to enter the relationship, to increasingly experience it, and to have great expectation that present blessedness assures us of future glory. We deceive ourselves, however, if we expect in this lifetime to arrive at a place wherein we can declare with finality and completion, "I've got it!"

For everything we know about the bond between God and ourselves, an immeasurable potential of glory waits to be discovered and applied. What is His role? What is our role? We will never fully find answers in this lifetime. Again, we can know enough to live abundantly in the Lord Jesus, and we should expect to do so as the Holy Spirit works in us to conform us to the image of Christ. Nevertheless, the infinite nature of God unites with our present limitations to maintain mystery as an ongoing aspect of our relationship with God.

Such mystery will always be uncomfortable to our flesh, which desires the absolute knowledge and certainty known only by God. We long for some new insight, teaching, or discipline whereby the discomfiting fact of our imperfection is somehow eliminated, or at least suppressed to the degree that we no longer sense our inherent human weakness. Certainly our Lord would have us grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus, and a more consistent experience of His involvement should be expected. However, our human frailties do not dissolve in our Lord's presence, or by His working in us. They rather become His holy means of preparing us to trust Him, and to avail ourselves of His strength "made perfect in weakness" (II Corinthians 12:9).

We must adjust ourselves to this reality, and the mystery of our relationship with God. He presently has us on a "need to know" basis. That is, whatever light we require to consistently trust and obey Him, and whatever brings genuine and contagious peace to our hearts, our Heavenly Father provides in much abundance. Further illumination, however, can wait until we are better equipped to receive it. Recognizing this present need for both the known and unknown will go far in enabling our assimilation of light given, and our acceptance of mysteries which remain...

"The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law." (Deuteronomy 29:29)