To be a shepherd after God’s own heart and to know Christ and the power of His resurrection and fellowship of His sufferings are the loftiest of goals. For me to consider knowing the heart of God would include knowing Him as being all powerful, all loving, all wise, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.
To Know His Boundless Love
The Cross gives us the greatest sense of God’s personal love. Jesus did not die for mankind as a mass, but as Paul wrote in Galatians 2:20, Christ “loved me, and gave himself for me.” This is the essence of the gospel: “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us” (1 John 4:10).
After the Fall, a lonely God, whose eternal heart ached for the fellowship of one created in His own image, went looking for a fugitive and guilty Adam in the Garden. God could not choose evil, but He could choose the alternative, to suffer. He was not responsible for the fall of man. But God’s suffering began with the Fall. Man, the created, chose evil; but God, the Creator, chose suffering. He could do no other, for He is not only holy, He is also love. Since God is love, He must choose to provide redemption for His God-imaged creature to be true to His nature.
To Know His Matchless Grace
God is a holy God—a thrice-holy God (Isaiah 6:1–3). His holiness provides the background for His justice and judgment. But turn from God’s holiness, which awes us, to His grace, which draws us. Herein is our only hope to find ourselves standing in God’s presence.
Each member of the Trinity is full of grace. The Father is the fountain, the source of grace; the Son is the channel, the medium of grace; the Holy Spirit is the administrator who makes the grace of God realized in our lives.
Grace is God’s presence and love through Christ Jesus given to the believer by the Holy Spirit, imparting mercy, forgiveness, and the desire and power to do God’s will.
To Know His Consuming Compassion
Compassion means “suffering with.” One of the striking things about Jesus was His compassion toward those in need. The lost, the lonely, the lovely, and the unlovely can all sense His compassion.
In contemplation of all that Christ had done for him, the apostle Paul said, “That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death” (Philippians 3:10). All of us want to know Jesus and the power of His resurrection. To participate with Him in His suffering and death is another matter. In Galatians 2:20, Paul presented the picture of the believer’s death with Christ and his rising to walk in resurrection life. Let that truth grip and control your life, and you will prove that Christianity is the outliving of an indwelling Christ.
I am committed to sound doctrine, to the solid ground of Scripture. But I also want to experience the dynamic of knowing God with a passion. I want to know God’s heart, His boundless love, His matchless grace, and His consuming compassion. I want to know Him whom to know is life eternal.
G. Raymond Carlson was general superintendent from 1986–93. He was also an author, former pastor, and educator. He helped launch the Decade of Harvest and served on a number of boards and committees including: the Pentecostal Fellowship of North America, the Pentecostal World Conference, National Association of Evangelicals, and the World Pentecostal Assemblies of God Fellowship. Brother Carlson at the 44th General Council in Portland, Oregon, delivered the above message. It is adapted from the September 15, 1991, Pentecostal Evangel.
