Last week, Steve Porter showed us why earning and willpower don’t produce transformation. The biblical model for change is relational—we grow as we abide in the relational love of God.
This week, we will focus on how Steve highlights that it’s not just learning more ABOUT God that changes us but also our EXPERIENCE of his tangible love in our daily lives. Not the concept but the actual reality.
To illustrate this, Steve uses the Grand Canyon analogy. You can read about the Grand Canyon your whole life—study the geology, know all the facts. But then you stand at the edge, and your jaw drops.
Factual knowledge is one thing. Experiential knowledge is another.
Job illustrates this. Job knew about God and lived in obedience to him. But at the end of his story, Job says: “My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you” (Job 42:5–6). Everything changed when Job experienced God firsthand.
J. I. Packer writes: “Our aim must be to know God himself better . . . not simply the doctrine of God’s attributes, but the living God whose attributes they are.”
It’s one thing to list that God is loving, faithful, and good. It’s another thing to entrust yourself to that God moment by moment.
Steve points to Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 3. Paul prays that the Ephesians would be “rooted and grounded in love” and that they would “know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.”
Notice—Paul is praying for people who already knew the fact of God’s love. But Paul prays they would come to experience that love more fully. To be rooted like a plant in soil. To swim around in the width, length, height, and depth of Christ’s love.
Here’s what Steve helps us see: We can hear sermons, read the Bible regularly, memorize it, and yet not be deeply transformed if these facts don’t become experientially real.
We can have “Christianity from the neck up”—lots of biblical information but not much inner transformation.
Read Steve’s full article:
[Experiencing the Transformational Love of Jesus]
