The Gospel Coalition

In addition to making my final edits to Unfashionable, I’m also working on some revisions for a re-release of Do I Know God which will come out at the same time that Unfashionable does (April 2009).

As many of you know, I wrote Do I Know God  (August 2007) to answer two basic questions: Is God knowable, and if he is, how can we know that we know him. I say in the book that if you know God, he wants you to know it. And if you don’t know God he wants you to know it. The two things God does not want are for you to think you know God if you don’t or for you to think you don’t know God if you do. It was a book that I felt needed to be written given the fact that Jesus says in Matthew 7:21-23 that there will be multitudes of people who go through life thinking they know God when in fact they don’t.

Anyway, here is a section that I have added to the revised edition. Let me know what you think.

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Over the past three chapters, I’ve shown you three ways that you can know you know God: when you believe in his promises, when you love what he loves and hate what he hates, and when your life shows the outward evidence of the living faith inside you.

Another helpful way to put this is that if you want to know whether or not you have a relationship to God, it involves retrospection, introspection, and extrospection.

By retrospection I mean looking back and remembering the relational promises of God that we examined in chapter 6. This involves your thinking capacities because it has to do with believing. It takes careful thought to properly evaluate the relational promises that God makes to sinners and to believe them. Unlike various eastern religions which encourage the disengagement of the mind, knowing God demands strong intellectual engagement. I’m not saying you have to be an intellectual to be a child of God. I simply mean there is no way any of us can truly know God if we check our minds at the door. Serious, thoughtful, inquiry into the eternal promises that God lays out in the Bible will help all of us attain a fuller assurance of our salvation.

By introspection I mean looking in and examining God’s presence in your life, a presence we defined in chapter 7. Is God the object of your most passionate desires? Do you love what God loves and hate what God hates? Do you long for God, hunger for God, thirst for God? This inevitably involves your emotional capacities because it has to do with feeling. Obviously, because our feelings are tainted with sin, our desires will always be somewhat of a mixed bag. Sometimes we will feel God and other times we won’t. Sometimes we will desire God, and other times we won’t. The real question is whether we want to desire God or not. I find myself praying on a regular basis, “O God help me to want to want you.” That’s the real issue. If we have no feelings for God whatsoever, then it’s safe to say that we don’t know him.

And by extrospection I mean looking out and observing the external production of God in your life. This involves your volitional capacities because it has to do with obedience. Do you seek to obey God? Do you love others? Do the patterns of your life indicate movement toward the will of God or movement away from the will of God? Are you working hard, by God’s grace and with God’s power, to do what pleases God?