An Encounter With The Risen Lord

If you want the promises of God, you have to get on the right ferry. And what ferry is that. It’s the experience that Paul had, recorded in Acts 9, a personal and real encounter with the Risen Christ. And he sums up this experience in vs. 8, which we’ve already read, when he tells of the “priceless gain of knowing Christ.” Paul had a personal encounter. All the years of religious ritual brought him nothing but emptiness. But one moment in time with the Master, brought him fulfillment beyond anything he could have imagined. The Ferry to Joy, and Peace, and Fulfillment is none other than the Person of Jesus Christ.

These other things, going to church, reading the Bible, praying, they’re all good things. They’re good as long as they are not the end goal, but are instead means to the end. These things are designed not to be what we seek to become, but instead they are the things that can bring us close to Christ so we can have that intimate and personal encounter. Going to church is not something we do to earn points with God, but because Jesus said, “For where two or three gather together in my name, I am there among them.” (Matthew 18:20) We read the Bible not because it gives us some higher standing with God, but because Jesus is the very Word of God and the Bible is the means by which God chose to reveal himself to us. We don’t find Jesus so that we can read the Bible, we read the Bible so that we may find Jesus. And surely we don’t pray out of ritual, but we do so because it is communication, even communion, with the one whom we love so dearly, our Lord, Jesus Christ. Prayer can be a meaningless ritual or it can be the encounter with God that we so desperately need.

Please notice with me that when Paul speaks of knowing Christ, he’s not talking about some great theological understanding of God. He’s not talking about some great epiphany or revelation that he has realized. There are many false religions that will tell you that knowledge is the key to salvation. I believe in education. I like education. In fact, Christians are commended for studying the Scriptures diligently in the Book of Acts. However, it is not education or knowledge that saves. The knowing Christ that Paul speaks of, the knowledge that is so great that everything else becomes trash in light of it, is not a book knowledge or an intellectual knowledge but a personal, intimate, relationship knowledge of Christ.

A story about the great relationship between a husband and a wife would go great here, but I’m not married yet, so I have to think of something else. Over the past year I’ve read some books about computers and networking. Thank God, I learned enough to pass the exams that I was trying to pass. At least right after I finished reading the books, I could have given you a lot of facts about computers. But throughout the entire study, I never actually did any of the things I read about. I had a lot of knowledge, but when I got a position volunteering in the school system, I realized that I knew nothing about computer networks. Now, after a month of getting in there and putting connectors together, after finding real live problems and having to figure out real live solutions to them, I feel like I know a lot more about computer networks. Every time I go in and spend more time with the network, I learn more and more about it. Now, certainly my relationship with computers is nothing like my relationship with Christ. But there are some parallels. You can study and study and study about Jesus Christ. You can know everything there is to know, and that doesn’t do you any good. Certainly my knowledge of computer networks didn’t make a computer network suddenly appear. I had to do something with that knowledge. And when I did, I discovered that I even needed a different kind of knowledge. And our study of Christ is to one end, to bring us to know him personally. It’s not “about Christ” that brings fulfillment, but it is the “Person of Christ” who brings fulfillment, that is Christ himself. Therefore, it is not knowledge about Christ that brings fulfillment, but it is relationship knowledge of Christ himself that brings the fulfillment.