Knowing God

“To Know God and make Him Known.”

YWAM is committed to know God, His nature, His character and His ways. Its from the overflow of knowing and enjoying fellowship with Him that we seek to reflect who He is in every aspect of our lives and ministry.

I heard Joy Dawson speak on this in 1978 with a passion that was strange to me.

As she shared with so much conviction about ways to get to know God my heart filled with faith that this is something I could also do. Vividly I remember walking into a bookstore and asked for the biggest notebook they have because I knew He was BIG and therefore I needed a BIG book. So for the next 3 years I made God my study and filled those pages with Bible verses and insights and revelations about who God is. Oh the joy of knowing Him. It was like a doorway of fellowshipping with this Trinity God and treasures were unlocked.

As Joy always reminds us “He is the event! The Bible is not primarily about man – it is about who God is.” I also discovered why it needed more grace for Moses to leave God’s presence than to go up the mountain. I went for a 30 day retreat alone with God on a mountain and it was more difficult to leave that place  than to have begun. My Mom said to me a week afterwards: You need to come down from the mountain because you never leave your room!”

Here are a few of the ways of how to get to know God (learned from Joy Dawson):

Let us acknowledge to God how little we really know Him. Tell God that you want Him to be the supreme desire of your life and ask Him to increase your desire and begin to seek Him. I love the way that Jeremiah reminds us “You will find Me when you search for Me with your whole heart (Jeremiah 29:13)

Begin to pray the prayers prayed by those who went before us. These are some of my favorites that have helped me to hunger and thirst for Him continually.

“As a deer pants for the water brooks, so pants my soul for You, O God! My soul thirsts for you” ~ Psalm 42:1-2

“O God You are my God, early will I seek You; My soul thirsts for You. My flesh longs for You, in a dry and thirsty land where there is no water. So I have looked for You in the sanctuary to see Your power and Your glory” ~ Psalm 63:1-2

Another focus is to study the ways of God which are the principles by which He operates. His ways reflects His character. Meditate on and obey His word. I quickly learned the difference between knowing His acts from His ways. As I studied His ways it became obvious that it needed deeper digging and more time spent with Him.

If we want the imprint of the nature of God on us then the study of His Son is imperative because He carried the imprint of His Father. From 2 Peter it is clear that it is the knowledge of God and not the knowledge about God.

“But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. To Him be glory both now and forever. Amen. (2 Peter 3:18)

~ Mariette Louw has been a leader and speaker in YWAM for many years both in Scotland and internationally. She currently lives in Glasgow.