Ephesians 3:14-19 — For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.

Over the past four days I have been thinking about God. More precisely, I’ve been thinking about God ever since I became a Christian, and even sometimes before that. It’s just been more focused recently, and I was pressed to write a few of the thoughts down.
What I have known for a long time — perhaps forever — is that I will never get all of God into my brain. For someone like me, who sets great store on the process of thinking that was pretty depressing for a while. After all, God tells us pretty clearly in Hebrews 1, and other places, that His Word and His Son provide us the revelation we need.
It turns out, though, that “thinking” about God is only a part of the story. The passage from Ephesians contains an important encouragement … “to know the love of Christ that passeth knowledge”. If you let your eyes just slip over the words I suppose it tells you that the love of Christ is wonderful — as it surely is. But the second look might make you pause; what does “which passeth knowledge” mean? Paul expresses himself in seemingly contradictory ways sometimes, and part of what he is saying here is that we can know something of Christ (and thence of God) but that Christ being infinite, we can never know all about Him.
There are some other places in the Bible where we can get some clues about knowing God. Colossians 1:9-11 carries the idea that prayer is very influential. Paul prays that the Colossians grow in their knowledge of God. Then in 2 Peter 1:2, Peter makes it clear that grace and peace grow in the Christian through and increasing personal knowledge of Jesus.
As I thought about all of this, and what I was discovering I came back to two things — Henry Blackaby’s classic work, “Experiencing God”, and my own history. In the end, I have returned to where I started. We have a God in three persons — people — and how do you get to know people? You get to know people by spending time with them, talking with them, watching them in action … And that’s how we get to know more about God!