knowledge of God.

is knowledge of God.—The one thing needful for men, the great cry of our nature, in which all other cries are swallowed up, is for knowledge—the knowledge of God. To know the true God has been the deep desire of living souls through all time. Wearied by the changes of a fleeting world, finding no repose in the best that the finite can give, men of earnest minds long to know the Eternal that they may rest in Him. An old mystic has said: “God is an unutterable sigh of the human soul.” With greater truth we may reverse the saying, and affirm that the human soul is a never-ending sigh after God. In its deepest recesses there lives or slumbers inextinguishable longing after Him, and the more we consider the nature of that longing, the more we discover that what it aims at is not a mere intellectual apprehension of God, but a personal relationship to Him. It is essentially of a practical nature. It is an impulse to draw nigh to God, to place ourselves in personal fellowship with Him from the conviction that He hath made these hearts of ours for Himself, and they are altogether restless till they find their rest in Him. And thus the cry of the earnest has always been that of the disciple: “Shew us the Father and it sufficeth us.” The dream that has haunted the earnest of the world has ever been this—to live the blessed life man must know the true God, and Christ proclaims that dream to be a fact. What does knowing God mean? It does not mean knowing Him by name, knowing about Him, knowing Him as a stranger and foreigner, whose speech and ways we have not been accustomed to; it means knowing Him in the sense in which we know a father, or mother, or friend, whom we love and value above every one else; whose ways and thoughts we are thoroughly acquainted with; and who, we feel, knows us thoroughly, feels with us, cares for us, and longs for our being happy.1 R. W. Church, Village Sermons,

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