In our digital, social media culture, the definition of “know” has changed. You can have hundreds of friends on social media, you can “know” their lives by what they share, you can even interact through comments, posts, and messages, but you don’t truly know 95-99% of those people through intimate, personal experience and interaction.
We were made for intimate relationships where we know one another below the surface, but so much of our world is full of superficial relationships. It’s easy to lump Jesus into one of those relationships. Many of us live as if Jesus is just a friend on social media. We have enough head knowledge about Jesus to carry on a conversation. We may have even grown up in church to answer many surface-level questions about Jesus, but we don’t truly know Jesus on an intimate level.
If we look at Jesus’s disciples, we can see a clear picture of the kind of relationship he desires for his followers. These disciples followed Jesus everywhere, throughout every part of his life, on every journey he took. Think of what took place in the three years of Jesus’s ministry on this earth. We have only the tiniest snippets of interactions through the Bible, but Jesus spent three years pouring his life into these 12 men. When Jesus ascended back into heaven after the resurrection, it wasn’t the load of knowledge that grew the church into what it is today; it was his close relationships with these men that changed everything about the way they lived after he left.
Acts 4:13 says, “When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus” (NIV). We, like Peter and John, are ordinary people. But when we know Jesus through close, personal interaction, people will see that we have been with Jesus.
Reflection/Discussion Question: In what ways can you spend intentional time with Jesus?
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