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“This is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent”. John 17:3

 

Lord Jesus, I begin this Friday with a heart of awe, peace, and gratitude. Though I’m glad “eternal life” includes living forever in the grandeur of the new heaven and new earth, you put the focus elsewhere. Eternal life is a quality of life before a quantity—it’s knowing you and our heavenly Father in the most intimate relationship imaginable. This is the essence, heartbeat, summum bonum, crux, core, magnificent splendor of eternal life.

Not merely knowing about you as informed “church people.” Not merely knowing your teachings, so we can live as informed moralists in an amoral world. Not merely being inspired by your compassion for the poor and commitment to social justice, that we might invoke your memory and name for our humanitarian causes.

Rather, to know you is to begin the journey of fulfilling our deepest longings for connection, relationship, and intimacy. No mere humans can satisfy these insatiable cravings—not a spouse, children, friends, parents, co-workers… only you. Only the Holy Spirit is powerful enough to bring us into such intimacy with you and the Father, and to take us further up and further into the matchless riches of such grace. And, hallelujah, only the Spirit can bring us back when we drift, run, or ignore our relationship with you.

To know you is to be fully known—in all of our brokenness, beauty, weakness and neediness. Equally, it’s to be fully loved—way beyond of current grasp, capacity to imagine, and hope that such a relationship with God could be ours.

Your mercy is our welcome. Your grace is our salvation. Your love is better than life. Your righteousness is our assurance. Your joy is our strength. Your peace is our ballast. Your sovereignty is our sanity. Your return is our hope. So Very Amen.

 

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