Understanding God’s Presence in Our Lives
The Unseen Reality of God
To most people, God is something we deduce from evidence rather than personally experience. We say, “He must be there,” and so we believe He exists. Some don’t even go that far; they’ve only heard about Him from others and tucked their belief in Him away with other ideas in their minds. To many, God is an ideal — a name for goodness, beauty, or truth, or the force behind the existence of everything.
All these beliefs about God are diverse, but they share one thing: none of them entail personal experience with God. Many don’t even consider the possibility of knowing God intimately. While they acknowledge His existence, they don’t think of Him as knowable like other things or people.
Christians, theoretically at least, go further. They’re taught to believe in a personal God and to pray to “Our Father in heaven.” This implies the potential for personal acquaintance. However, for many Christians, God remains just as distant as He is for non-Christians. They live trying to love an ideal and be loyal to a principle.
Contrasting with these vague notions is the clear scriptural teaching that God can be known personally. The Bible is full of references to a living God who walks, speaks, loves, and manifests Himself. It assumes that we can know God as surely as we…
