I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better.
Ephesians 1:17
I’ve just been listening to a programme on the radio in which an academic has slated the internet as a source of knowledge. His principle concern is that internet becomes circular, which results in half-truths and downright lies being given more credibility than they deserve. The academic was keen to highlight Wikipedia as a key concern here. His worry was that someone might write something untruthful on Wikipedia, which is then taken up and quoted elsewhere, perhaps in the mainstream media. That ‘fact’ can then be referenced on Wikipedia, and therefore becomes accepted as truth. This clearly raises significant questions for our age. Where do we get our knowledge from? If we want to find out about someone of something, where do we go for reliable information? And more significantly still, what is truth?
For the Christian, we might want to know how we can find out more information about our God. If we are to know him as our Father, we need to know him in the sense of understanding who he is and what he is like. This seems like a challenging prospect. How can we genuinely know God?
Luckily for us, Paul, in the words of the prayer quoted above, gives us an insight into how we might achieve this. The key to knowing God is the Holy Spirit. Paul believes that the Holy Spirit can equip us to know God better. He describes the Holy Spirit as ‘the Spirit of wisdom and revelation’. The Holy Spirit can equip us with the intellect and insight to better understand who God is. The Holy Spirit can reveal to us the nature of God through the Bible. Unlike the internet, the Holy Spirit is a useful, trustworthy and entirely reliable source of knowledge about God, as is his word, the Bible.
I will be praying Paul’s prayer in the days ahead, both for myself and my friends and family. Will you join me in praying that God may ‘give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better’?