Knowing God by Experience  | John 14:15-21

If you have got a Bible with you, I am going to read some verses initially from John’s gospel in John 14. I am going to read from John 14:15-21. John 14:15, and Jesus is speaking to His disciples and He says to them,

“If you love me, you will obey what I command. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever – the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him”, (and this is how you know him), “for he lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.

“Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. Whoever has my commands and obeys them is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him.”

Well, those are some very rich words. We’re not going to unpack them all tonight but those words are about knowing God. That’s our theme and we have looked at this on two previous occasions. We talked about the existence of God on that first occasion, looking at some of the evidences from a closed Bible, of the existence of God, of a Creator. And then we talked about the knowability of God on the second occasion.

But I want to talk to you today about experiencing God, because if I asked the question: how do we really know God? We need to answer that by asking another question: how do we really know anybody? You know we may know about God, we may know about other people propositionally – that is certain facts that are stated about them, we can know certain facts about God. And the last time I talked about some of the facts about God’s being that are revealed to us in Scripture, such as His omnipotence (that He is all-powerful), His omniscience (that he knows everything), His omnipresence (He’s in all places at all times, His immutability (these are all big words of course and I’m sure you learned them last time), that God does not change at all, His eternal nature, He had no beginning, He had no end, His manifestation as three yet one and the complex revelation of God as Trinity. And all these are true. All of these can be substantiated from Scripture and all these may be interesting. But all these may leave you cold even though you believe them.

I like to read biography. I have just read two fairly thick biographies – one of Mao Tse Tung that was published about four or five weeks ago. And I have just read a thick one on Queen Elizabeth and the monarchy. And I just started another one on Stephen Harper. And these books give us a lot of facts about these people and I could recite some of those facts that I have gleaned from these books to you.

But in the Bible, God is not simply revealed to us by a series of facts that are given about Him, important as those may be, but God reveals Himself in Scripture experientially. That is, we know God by our experience of God, by our relationship with God. He doesn’t simply give us a catalogue of facts. You know, biographically, these are things that are true of God, do you believe them, you know, go through the list and check them off – I believe them or I don’t. But rather He reveals Himself primarily in Scripture in His relationships with people and His actions amongst people. And out of that, people learn who God is. That’s why I read these verses in John 14. For instance, the world does not know Him, neither sees Him - the Spirit that is – or knows Him, but you know him, why? For he lives in you and He will be with you. You have experience of Him. That’s why you know Him. The end of John 14:21:

“He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him.”

That is: “I will show myself in the context of relationship” - in relationship where there is experience of God together. And relationship with God comes from experience of God. How you develop relationship is through experience of Him. That is true on the human level as well. How I might know you is on the basis of my relationship with you and vice versa. We will never be satisfied with knowing about God. I could give you a list of all the right things about God that would never satisfy your heart or your soul. We are satisfied only by our experience of God.

And I want to talk about this tonight – experiencing God. I am indebted and I want to acknowledge this, to Henry Blackaby who makes this point so well in his book “Experiencing God”. And basically, the thesis of that book, which I recommend to you, is that our knowledge of God derives from our experience of God. And that is true.

In Scripture, the names of God – and there are various names; I’ll mention some of them tonight – all express some aspect of His character and they were all revealed in the context of experiencing that aspect of His character. That’s how they came to know Him by those names.

Let me try and illustrate this. I have various names actually, depending who it is. My real name of course is Charles Price, which doesn’t tell you very much about me, unless you know that ‘Price’ is a Welsh name and so you learn from that I am of Welsh ancestry. And so you might presume from that that I can sing, but I can’t, though the Welsh love to sing. I have no idea where ‘Charles’ came from; it’s not in my family. I understand my father was reading the biography of John Wesley when I was born and I had an older brother called ‘John’, so my two names are Charles Wesley Price. But I must have disappointed my father enormously; I never wrote a song.

But I have other names as well. There are three people in the world who call me ‘Dad’. That’s the name they use for me. They don’t call me ‘Charles’, they don’t call me ‘Mr. Price’; they call me ‘Dad’. Only three people in the world do that. That name speaks of a relationship.

There is one person who calls me, depending on what’s going on – it can range from ‘darling’, ‘sweetheart’ (those are the good times) to ‘Charles’.

There are five people in the world who call me their brother and I was with them all last week and they call me their brother. And sometimes there are folks on the road who call me ‘that driver’. All these names that are used are all indicative of relationship.

And there is an interesting verse in Psalm 9:10 where it says,

“Those who know your name will trust in you.”

Psalm 9:10:

“Those who know your name…”

Now we all know names about God but what that means is this: those who have experienced something of you will trust you in that area. And I want to talk about this to encourage you tonight because God does reveal Himself to us in our experience.

I want to look at one name in particular of God; it’s the name ‘Jehovah’. It’s the most frequently used name of God in Scripture. Now our English Bibles don’t translate ‘Jehovah’ or ‘Yahweh’ (there’s some uncertainty exactly how that name should be pronounced because the Jewish people never used the vowels when they wrote the names, just the consonants; they didn’t pronounce it either). But in the New International Version, the Bible which I use, it is written as LORD in capital letters. If you have an NIV you will see sometimes it will say LORD in all letters L-O-R-D in capital. That’s because it is translating the word ‘Jehovah’. When it is compounded with another name for God, ‘Adonai’ (Hebrew name which means owner or master), they translate that in the NIV as ‘Sovereign LORD’. And you will find LORD in capital letters and Sovereign LORD over 6,000 times in the New International Version of the Bible.

Now it’s Moses who discovered God’s name was Jehovah. And he discovered this in Exodus 3 and you may remember this occasion when Moses met God at the burning bush. For 80 years Moses, since a child, had been a believer in God because, although he was brought up in the royal household of Pharaoh, his mother – his parents were Hebrews and his mother had been his nursemaid in Pharaoh’s palace and it was she who would have told him who he really was – that he was a Jew, he was one of the covenant people of God. And growing up, he knew about God, who had set apart the nation of Israel to be His own particular people.

But at the age of 40 he believed that God would use him to deliver Israel from their years of bondage. They had been in Egypt for 400 years – at first gone there under the protection of the Egyptians as relatives of Joseph. But as years went by, Joseph was forgotten; they had multiplied. We don’t know how many years they had been reduced to slavery but certainly for several generations. And at the age of 40 Moses knew that God wanted to deliver them out of Egypt and he thought, “I’m the man to do it”. He had all the right connections in the royal court. And he killed an Egyptian, you remember, and then had to flee out to the desert, and spent the next 40 years defeated on the backside of the Midian desert looking after sheep.

 And when he was 80 years of age, (he’s an old man now), he saw a bush burst into flame, which wouldn’t be unusual in the heat of the desert – spontaneous combustion was probably a common phenomenon. But whenever that happened, usually the bush very quickly burned itself out. But this bush burned and burned and Moses thought, “I’ll go and see this great sight. Why doesn’t this bush burn out?” And as he came to the bush God spoke to him from within the bush, “Moses, take off your shoes. You’re on holy ground. I have seen the cry of My people, I have seen their misery, I’ve seen their condition, I’ve heard their cry. I have come down to rescue them and take them out of this land to a good and a spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey.” I am sure Moses got excited. “God we have been praying for this for years.”

“So now, go, I am sending you.”

Moses said, “Well, who am I?”

“I will be with you Moses.”

Moses said, “Well, who are you?” He didn’t say it quite as straight as that. He said, “If I go to the Israelites and tell them that God sent me and they say, ‘what is His name?’ what shall I tell them?”

And God said, “I AM who I AM” - a wonderful revelation of Himself. That’s where we get the name Jehovah. Not “I was the burning bush, the one who called you, so now do your best to get them out.” Nor “I will be in Canaan to welcome you”, but “I AM”, (in the present tense), everything, Moses, you will ever need. I AM who I AM – Jehovah.” In other words, “I am completely sufficient for you Moses. I am sending you but I am going to be with you and that means you will have nothing to fear, nothing to panic about. No crisis will ever back you against a wall and leave you hopelessly overwhelmed. I am sufficient.”

Well Moses then had to prove that in his experience. He went in to Pharaoh, knocked on his door, “Would you let the Israelites go?”

“Why should I?”

“God said so.”

“I don’t know your God”, and he threw him out.

Moses went back and said, “God I knew that wouldn’t work. What do I do now?”

“Go down to the Nile. When Pharaoh comes down to the Nile, just take your staff and just dip it in the water and see what happens. I am sufficient - Jehovah.”

Moses did that and the water turned to blood. You remember the plagues that followed. Every one of them was God demonstrating His sufficiency against the rejection of Pharaoh to allow the Israelites to go. And eventually, after the death of the firstborn son in every Egyptian family, the tenth plague, they were about to leave Egypt; everything was going well until they got to the Red Sea. And when they got to the Red Sea, they couldn’t cross it, they couldn’t tunnel under it, they couldn’t go around it, the people began to panic, the Egyptians changed their minds, came to round them up and take them back again. And the people said, “Moses, what are you doing? We can’t possibly defend ourselves against the Egyptians. We’re all going to be drowned in the Red Sea.” And Moses simply said, “Do not be afraid. The Lord will fight for you. You will hold your peace. I have discovered something about God. His name is ‘Jehovah’, His name is ‘I AM’, His name is ‘I’m totally sufficient at any time, any situation’. And I have been learning it for the last number of months, so do not be afraid, stand firm.”

And Moses said to God, “What should we do?”

And God said, “Move on.”

“But there’s the Red Sea.”

“Move on.”

“Alright”. Put his toe in the Red Sea. “Now what?”

“Hold your staff over the sea.”

Moses held his staff over the sea all night. God caused a mist to descend to keep the Egyptians from gaining on the Israelites and when the morning came, they found a parting through the Red Sea and they discovered that God had opened the way for them. And they came through on dry land, as you remember, in Exodus 15, they had a great time of celebration and they said “It’s the Lord who brought us out, it’s the Lord who drowned the Egyptians behind us in the Red Sea, it’s the Lord who is our strength, it’s the Lord who is our victory.”

You see, they discovered this: God’s name is Jehovah. Now it wasn’t a theory. Moses wasn’t sitting in a Sunday school class. “These are the names of God”… Jehovah – alright fine, okay, I know that now” – he had to learn it in experience. He had to learn it by proving that God was totally sufficient, by going out on a limb in obedience to Him. And that’s how you get to know God.

And you know, some of us, we know facts about God. And when God first revealed His name, He first told him, I AM who I AM – He revealed His name - but he never knew His name until he acted in obedience. And then he discovered that God was as good as His name – totally sufficient.

There are several names in Hebrew – again, these don’t translate well into our English Bibles but some of you will be familiar with these – compound names of Jehovah, names out of Jehovah. Abraham for instance, in Genesis 22 discovered God’s name was Jehovah-Jireh; do you know what that means? It means ‘The Lord, who is totally sufficient – Jehovah – the Lord will provide.” And you remember the story, I am sure, that when God had given to Abraham and Sarah their son Isaac, having promised him for 25 years, and then gave him to them. And one day God said,

“Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about.”

“Abraham, take this son, this son whom you love (God stressed that) and take him to a mountain and offer him as a sacrifice”. What an incredible instruction. And it says, early the next morning, Abraham left taking Isaac with him. After three days they left the servants who had travelled with them and Abraham and Isaac walked up Mount Moriah together. And in Verse 6 – let me read it – in Genesis 22:6,

“Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and placed it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. And as the two of them went on together, Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, ‘Father?’

“’Yes, my son?’ Abraham replied,

“’The fire and wood are here,’ Isaac said, ‘but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?’

Isaac was observant enough to know that the most vital ingredient in the burnt offering they were going to offer was missing. “Where is the lamb?” It must have broken Abraham’s heart because he knew what the lamb was to be his son, but he answered,

“God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” And the two of them went on together.

“And when they reached the place God told them about, Abraham built an alter there and arranged the wood…bound his son Isaac, laid him on the alter…reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son, when an angel said, ‘Abraham, do no lay a hand on the boy. Don’t do anything. Now I know that you fear God because you have not withheld your son, your only son from me’.

“And Abraham looked up and there in a thicket was a ram caught by its horn. He went over, took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called the place Jehovah-Jireh.”

It says in my translation,

“He called the place The Lord Will Provide.” (Jehovah-Jireh).

Now listen: Abraham did not know that God was Jehovah-Jireh who would provide prior to this. If you know the story of Abraham, you know there was an occasion when having been brought to Canaan and God said that “I am going to bless you in this land and make you a blessing and all nations of the world will be blessed through you.” And then a famine came to the land and so rather than staying as he had been told to do, he went down to Egypt and then he had to tell lies and claim his wife was really his sister when he was down in Egypt and he got himself into a mess. Do you know why? Because he did not know at that stage that God’s name was Jehovah-Jireh. And because of the famine, he thought, “I’ve got to go and get some food” rather than saying, “The Lord will provide; just obey and stay where he told you to be.”

On another occasion, God had promised him a son. He was already 75 when God made that promise to him. His wife was already 65; they had no children. They had been married for years and it says she was barren. And after ten years of the promise, there was no son. And Abraham did not know at this stage that God was Jehovah-Jireh, The Lord will Provide. He tried to provide the son himself and so through the maid, Hagar, which in the culture of the day was an acceptable thing, he produced a son for the family - Ishmael. But Ishmael was produced by Abraham, trying to do what God had promised, but to do it by his own human ingenuity.

And he produced a son and God had to bring Abraham to the place where he said, “take the son” (when God eventually gave him Isaac), “take the son whom you love and I want you to learn a lesson, Abraham, and you will never be the same again when you have learned this lesson. What you are going to learn is: the Lord will provide, His name is Jehovah-Jireh.”

Now he didn’t sit down in a Bible class and they say, “Now Abraham, God’s name is Jehovah-Jireh – that means The Lord Will Provide. Have you got that written down? Okay, good, that’s fine, you’ve learnt it.” No, he had to learn it in experience. We get to know God in our experience.

I had to learn God was Jehovah-Jireh. When I was a student I worked for one summer with Operation Mobilization in Spain, and we were selling books from door to door. And we hadn’t got any money between us; the only money we could live on was the money we made from the books that we sold. The idea of selling these books was that they were evangelistic books. Spain was a pagan country, not a lot of interest, but we were selling books. But we were running out of money and we hadn’t got any food. And one day I asked God to help me to sell 1000 pesetas worth of books that day – the highest anybody had sold in our team was 600 pesetas worth. And I said, Lord – I remember specifically saying, Lord help me to sell a thousand pesetas worth of books today. And we went around selling these books and I sold some – I wasn’t keeping track of the money.

On the way back to our van at the end of the day, I stopped a man, offered him a book and he wasn’t interested. But he said, as I turned away from him, he said, “Hey but hang on” and he put his hand in his pocket and gave me some loose change – it wasn’t a lot but he gave me some loose change, didn’t buy a book. So I said, “Well take a book anyway”, so I gave him the book, went back to our van. And I counted up the money I had, and with his little bit of loose change, it was exactly 1000 pesetas. And I learned that day God’s name is Jehovah-Jireh. I learned that day that if God lays something on your heart, and I believed that He had laid that 1000 pesetas on my heart – it wasn’t just my idea, I wasn’t testing God – that He would provide. And I learned that day that if something is right, God is going to provide for it even when you don’t know where it is going to come from. And I have proved that since then in other ways as well. But we have to learn it some way. You have to learn it and experience of God.

Joshua had to learn that God’s name was Jehovah-Nissi. Do you know what Jehovah-Nissi means? That’s the Hebrew term. It means: the one who fights for us. He discovered that in Exodus 17 when the Israelites had just left Egypt and they had crossed the Red Sea. And the first enemy they came to were the Amalekites. And God told Moses to go on to the mountain with his brother Aaron and another man called Hur and to hold his staff in the air on this hill overlooking the battlefield between the Israelites and the Amalekites. And Moses told Joshua – the first time Joshua is ever mentioned in the Bible – to form an army and lead the army and fight against the Amalekites. But it wasn’t their skills that caused them to win. As Moses held his staff in the air, the Israelites prevailed over the Amalekites and when Moses’ staff began to droop, the Amalekites began to overrun the Israelites. And Moses would lift up his staff again and the Israelites began to drive back the Amalekites. And when he got tired and rested, the Amalekites would begin to gain on the Israelites… hold his staff up and they would reverse; the Israelites would begin to conquer them. The staff, of course, that he held in his hand was something he had thrown down at the burning bush as a symbol of his submission to God and the staff became a symbol thereafter of God’s sovereignty in Moses’ life. And interestingly, when they won the battle over the Amalekites and they were defeated, God said to Moses – let me just find it here – it says in Exodus 17:14

“The Lord said to Moses, ‘Write this on a scroll as something to be remembered and make sure that Joshua hears about it, because I will completely blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven.

“Moses built an altar and called it The Lord is my Banner” (Jehovah-Nissi).

The Lord is my Banner – the one who fights for us. But it is interesting he says, “Make sure Joshua hears about this, make sure Joshua understands although he led the army in the valley and he fought a good fight, it wasn’t his skills or his military expertise that caused him to win the victory. God gave them the victory.”

You see Joshua was going to become Moses’ successor, as leader and Moses [Joshua] would need to know that he is dealing with a Jehovah-nissi – a God who fights for us.

In Numbers 13, when they were in the wilderness, you may remember that Moses sent twelve spies into Canaan to spy out the land. And they came back and they said to Moses after forty days of exploring the land, that “everything about the land we heard is good, it’s prosperous, it flows with milk and honey, but there is a problem and that is that there are people there who are giants, there are seven different nations, they live in 45 cities. We’re just a nomadic tribe; we would never be able to conquer them”.

And ten of the twelve said, “We cannot occupy the land” but two of the twelve (one of which was Joshua; there other was his friend Caleb), said, “It’s true that they are stronger and better equipped and more numerous than we are” but Joshua remembered – he was told – Moses was told, “Make sure Joshua understands that this victory over the Amalekites is the Lord’s doing, The Lord is my Banner, He is the one who fights for us.

And Joshua said in Numbers 14:8, he said,

“If the Lord is pleased with us, he will lead us into that land, a land flowing with milk and honey, and he will give it to us.”

“This”, says Joshua, “is God’s business; don’t look at it simply in terms of human resources and human strength, measuring ourselves against them. We are on God’s business, God is going to give us the victory”. And the ten outvoted Joshua and Caleb and they turned back and spent the next 38 years, 40 years in all, in the wilderness, until that generation had died, apart from Joshua and Caleb.

And when Joshua then came to lead the Israelites into Canaan, 38 years later, the book of Joshua is a story of victory after victory in battle after battle, because Joshua had learned in his experience, The Lord is our Banner, the Lord is our Victor. In fact, 28 times in the book of Joshua it speaks of Canaan as “the land the Lord will give us”. Joshua said that often – “the land the Lord will give us. This is not something we are going to have to fight for; it is something we are going to receive. God will give it to us as we obey Him, trust Him. Because back in Exodus 17 when we were leaving the Red Sea and we faced the Amalekites, I learned a lesson”, Joshua might have said, “I learned the Lord is our victory, our strength. He gives us victory in the battle.”

Joshua didn’t learn that in a Bible class. “Joshua, sit down, take notes, here you are. The Lord gives victory. Have you written it down? Okay, remember it.” No, he had to learn it in experience; we know God by experience.

I mentioned when I was a student, I spent one summer in Spain. I spent another summer – in fact, two summers – smuggling Bibles into the Communist world as it was then in Eastern Europe, with a friend of mine. And we had a vehicle and had built some false sections in it where we could hide about 150 New Testaments and Bibles and books. I remember the first country we went into was Bulgaria, which at that stage was a very tight country, no freedom for the believers there. And as we were at the border, the car in front of us was searched. They took a long time; they took everything out of the car; they opened all the suitcases on the pavement in front of us. And we sat in our car saying, “What is going to happen if they search our car?” We resolved we wouldn’t tell lies if they asked us, “What have you got on board?” we would have to tell them.

And in fact, going into Czechoslovakia, they asked us to make a list of all the things we were bringing into the country. So, we made a long list, included everything we had in the car including three pens, twenty paper clips, six pieces of paper – at the end of it we put fifty New Testaments and one hundred Bibles and by the time they got down that list, they had stopped reading because there was so much trivia in there.

But I remember we sat there, we were nervous, we waited a long time and then they put all the suitcases back in front of the car in front, they waved us forward, we opened the window and he said, “Off you go” and just waved us straight through. And from our rear-view mirror, as the car pulled up behind us, they stopped him, got him out and his passenger out – I don’t know what happened to them next. And we learned something; we learned Jehovah-nissi – the Lord is our Banner. If you are on God’s business, He is your protector.

Joshua learned that. You see, we don’t learn things about God as a means of knowing God; we experience God as a means of knowing God. Gideon learned that God’s name was Jehovah-shalom. Many of you know ‘shalom’ means peace; the Lord is our Peace. You see, Gideon, one of the judges, led Israel at a time when they were being oppressed by the Midianites and in Judges 6 – I’ll just read a couple of verses here to see how Gideon learned this in Judges 6:14, the Lord said to Joshua [Gideon],

“Go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian’s hand.”

And Gideon asked, “How can I save Israel?”

Interesting…” Go in the strength you have”. What does he have? Well, he missed something, which you can pick up because it’s in Judges 6:12 when the angel of the Lord said to Gideon,

“The Lord is with you, mighty warrior.”

Now, Gideon probably said, “Okay, thank you, great” and then when he said, “Go in the strength you have”, he said, “I haven’t got any strength”. You’ve missed the whole point! The Lord is with you; the Lord is your strength. He hadn’t learned it because he hadn’t yet experienced it; it was just theory, doctrine, ideas.

“Go in the strength you have.”

“But I don’t have any strength. How can I save Israel? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh and I am the least in the family.”

And the Lord answered the second time, “I will be with you. Gideon, it’s not about you. I will be with you.”

And then Gideon said, “Well, if I have found favour in your eyes, give me a sign.” And you remember that he asked for a sign; we talk about Gideon’s fleece, full of doubt as most of us are at this stage in our walk with God. And then eventually God intervened and it says in Judges 6:24,

“Gideon built an altar to the Lord there and called it The Lord is Peace.”

Jehovah-shalom is how the Hebrew puts that. Now Gideon has learned this in his own experience.

So, the next time in Judges 7 when they are going to battle, he has got an army of 32,000 men and they are going to fight an army of 135,000 men – that’s more than four times as many. They are already outnumbered. And God said to Gideon, “There’s a problem”.

Gideon might well have said, “Yes, there is. There’s too many of them and there is not enough of us.”

“No Gideon, the problem is there’s too many of you. You’re only 32,000, they’re 135,000 but I want you to know this is not going to be accomplished in your strength. It is I who is going to give you the victory. So, get rid of 22,000 of your 32,000. And Gideon was left with 10,000 and God said, “It’s still too many”. And he reduced it to 300 men against an army of 135,000 men.

And Gideon said, “I learned something in the last chapter; I learned the Lord is our Peace, Jehovah-shalom. He is going to give us peace in this situation; He will bring us victory in this situation.” So, he said to his 300 men, against the 135,000 other men, “Come on, let’s go. God is with us.”

And God gave them victory against overwhelming odds. Gideon didn’t learn that in a Bible class. “Gideon, write down ‘Jehovah-shalom’. What do you think that means?”

“Well, Jehovah means, God – I AM; shalom means peace. It means God is our peace.”

“Well done, Gideon; you’ve learned it.”

That isn’t how he learned it. He learned it in his experience of life.

Samuel learned God’s name is Ebenezer because you may remember in 1 Samuel 7 the Israelites had been beaten by the Philistines. They had stolen, twenty years ago, the Ark of the Covenant, taken it off; humiliated them. It was the Israelites’ fault; they have been dependent on themselves. They had been superstitious about the Ark; now it had been stolen. And in 1 Samuel 7, twenty years after they had been defeated, they came to fight against the Philistines once again. And Samuel said to the people that,

“If you are returning to the Lord with all your hearts” (in 1 Samuel 7:3) “then rid yourselves of foreign gods and commit yourselves to the Lord and serve him only, and he will deliver you out of the hand of the Philistines.”

“Israelites, recognize this is God – although you have a history of defeat – God is going to deliver you.” And they went into battle and He did deliver them. And in 1 Samuel 7:12 it says,

“Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen. He named it Ebenezer, saying, ‘Thus far the Lord helped us.’”

Ebenezer means God has helped us - God has done this.

You know, the lessons we learn when we read the Bible have got to become experienced to become real. I learned a long time ago that people don’t learn very much listening to a sermon. So why do I preach every week? I’ll tell you what preaching does; is it explains the work of God. People who say, “That is exactly what I experienced this week, that is exactly what I went through last week,” they say, “Now I know it was God, now I know it’s God who is at work in my life.” And many times, at the end of the service when I stand at the front here and talk to people who come to talk to me, they often say, “What you said this morning, let me tell you what happened to me last week.” And the two will come together. What they are saying is, “Now you’ve explained – it was God who was doing this. I’ve learned it now.”

You can hear things, and then next week you can experience them. Preaching is valid as it is a pointer to your experience of God. If you have no experience of God, preaching is the most boring thing in the world; you don’t learn very much.

Jesus said some great things about Himself of course and here’s a couple just very quickly. He said on one occasion, “I am the bread of life.” It’s in John 6:35,

“I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.”

Do you remember when He said that? Do you remember what else happened in John 6? In John 6, in the early part of that chapter, he was preaching to a crowd of 5,000 men plus their families. And they stayed listening, ran out of food; there was no food. So, He said to His disciples, “How are we going to feed them?”

They said, “We haven’t got enough money. 800 Denarii would not be enough to buy enough for each one to have a bite.”

And there was a boy. He came to Andrew. He had five loaves and two fish and Andrew brought them apologetically to Jesus and said, “Here’s a boy with five loaves and two fishes. What are they among so many?”

And Jesus gave thanks and began to break the bread and the fish and all 5,000 were fed. They collected up twelve basketfuls of leftovers; do you remember that? And then later in that chapter, Jesus said, “I am the bread of life. Disciples: have you got the point? You may think I am insufficient – one man here in Israel. But look what happens to the bread when God gets hold of it and breaks it and breaks it and breaks it and breaks it. I am the bread of life. You will always have enough because he who comes to Me will never go hungry; you will always have enough.”

But you see, it wasn’t just, “Here’s something I want you to think about: I am the bread of life.” No, they had been eating food miraculously provided. And then they talked about the manna and all that. But He said, “I am the bread of life.”

Do you remember when He said, “I am the resurrection and the life?” It was in Bethany when Lazarus was lying dead – four days dead in a tomb. His sister Martha came running to Jesus, when He arrived after four days, and said, “If only you had been here my brother would not have died.” She looked to the past and said, “You know, you could have done something in the past and You didn’t.”

He said, “Your brother will rise again.”

So, she then talked about the future: “I know he will rise again in the resurrection, at the last day.” And Martha, interestingly, has a Jesus who can cope with the past and a Jesus who can cope with the future, but not a Jesus who can cope with the present, in her understanding. “If you had been here (past tense), it would have worked. I know he will raise again in the last day (future tense).”

And what did Jesus say? “I am the resurrection and the life (in the present tense). You see, Martha you have to learn this: that you can be in a situation where you think all your resources are totally exhausted. I want you to learn this: I am the resurrection and the life.”

And He stood in front of the tomb and said, “Lazarus, come out!” And Lazarus came out.

You see, they weren’t simply having a Bible study and He said, “I want you to know I am the resurrection and the life. Philip, have you got that? Good. What about Thomas, you got that Thomas? Judas, did you understand that? Okay? Resurrection; yes that’s right, that’s how you spell it - double ‘s’.”

No, it’s in the situation of standing in front of a corpse in a tomb. “I am the resurrection.”

Are you experiencing God? Because this is where you will know God. Now, be careful that sometimes we tend to be a bit cynical and say, “Well, it wasn’t God; it was just coincidence.”

Somebody said, “Isn’t it amazing how coincidences increase when you pray?” But sometimes – and there are many things in life, you can just stand back. Joshua could have said, “Well actually we had a pretty good army down there and we were lucky. Boy we beat the Amalekites.” They could have thought in those terms.

You know the devil is always there to snatch away the seed of the Truth, the Word of God from our hearts, and for us to attribute it to other things. Because I believe this, we will only grow in our knowledge of God when we learn what God teaches us today and we live in the good of it. When God taught me the day, I got 1000 pesetas from selling books, having prayed for 1,000 pesetas, God should not need to teach me again as though for the first time, “I can provide your need.” Now make that an assumption and just get on with what He gives you to do, assuming He is going to meet our need – and He does.

When I learned at the Bulgarian border, if you are doing the right thing God will look after the details, I shouldn’t need to learn that again. Just make sure you are doing the right thing and trust God with the details. Now of course, it could have been quite in order for us to have been held up at the border and had all kinds of trouble at the border and God would have used that in some way, but He taught us that day.

That’s why, you know, often in the early years of your Christian life you have more dramatic experience of God than you tend to have in the later years of your Christian life - not because you grow cold but because you have learned the lesson.

In the book of Acts, by the way, there are a lot more miracles in the first seven or eight chapters than there are in the rest of the whole of the book of Acts. You find that also in the ministry of Jesus. There are more miracles in the early part of the gospels than there are in the latter part of the gospels, because they are getting their signs. You’ve learnt the message; you’ve learnt the truth; you don’t need to go on relearning it. You’ve learned to depend on God; you’ve learned that God is sufficient; you’ve learned He’s strong.

And many of us in our early days of our walk with God have experience with God that is fresher and more dramatic and sensational because God is teaching us things. And now we simply learn to live in the good of that and with the certainty of that.

We need to take every answered prayer as an opportunity to go further and deeper with God, to take every work of God as an opportunity to now go deeper, go beyond that. We haven’t time – I’m finishing now – but you know in Scripture there are tragic stories of people who forgot to remember what God had already shown them and so they slid away again. The forgot to remember what God had shown them. Again and again, you find that happening. We need to remember what God has shown us, what God has proved to us in our experience. Now move on, assume that, don’t have to relearn it, assume it, believe it and God will take you deeper and further in your knowledge of Him.

So, if we’re talking about knowing God, as we are in these occasions, these various evenings, we know God by experiencing God. We need to know the facts about God, to know He is all-powerful, to know His is omniscient and all these things. We need to know those things, but they’re never real and life to us until we step out on a limb and say, “There’s only one explanation for what’s going to happen now. Either the all-powerful God intervenes or I’m on my own.” And you discover He’s always as good as His name.

Let’s pray together. Lord, thank You so much for the many names by which You have revealed Yourself to us in Your Word - every one of them telling us a story of how You have intervened in somebody’s life, in somebody’s experience. And I pray that as we seek to grow in Christ that we’ll be men and women who increasingly experience God – not just believe the facts about Him but experience You working in our lives as our strength, as our peace, as our lover, as our victory, as the all-sufficient One. Make this real and living for us we pray. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.