THE PATHWAY TO SPIRITUAL KNOWLEDGE

1. Living by faith

Have you ever questioned in your own mind whether the Bible were really so or not? Have you ever wondered in your own mind whether what Jesus taught was actually the truth or not? Has a doubt ever entered your mind as to whether Jesus actually came from God or not?

Each Sunday morning in our affirmation of faith we say that we believe in God, in Christ, in the Holy Spirit, in the crucifixion, in the resurrection, in heaven, in the judgment, and in the life everlasting. We affirm that we believe these things and others, but do we know them to be true? Indeed, can a person actually know these great doctrines to be true?

Of course a person does not have to know that these things are true in order to be a Christian, surprising though this may be to some people. The Christian life is a life of faith. It is a life that, as the Apostle Paul said in 2 Corinthians 5:7, "We walk by faith, not by sight." We are saved by faith, not by a scientific knowledge of cold facts. In the Christian life one is called many times to walk by faith where he cannot see, and to travel along pathways that may seem strange to human wisdom where one can trust but may not understand. The prophet Habakkuk, living in a confused time where he could not understand some of the workings of God, sought for some answers as to why things were as they were, and God said to him, "the just shall live by his faith." Our knowledge in this world is at best a partial knowledge. Here in this world we "know in part" and we "see through a glass darkly".

To enter the Christian life we do not have to know beyond all doubt all of the great doctrines of the Christian faith to be true. We need have only enough faith that they are true to accept Jesus as our Saviour and to yield our lives in obedience unto His will. We do not have to know. We only have to believe, we only have to trust enough to live as if these things were so!

Moses believed in God and cast in his lot with the people of God before he ever came to really know God in a highly personal way. You remember how, when God met Moses on the back side of the desert and spoke to him out of the midst of the burning bush, Moses did not even know God's Name!

Job was a perfect and an upright man, one who worshipped God and sought to obey Him long before he came into a personal experience and knowledge of God. You remember the cry of Job when his friends came to comfort him in his distress. Speaking of God, Job said, "Oh, that I knew where I might find Him!" He believed in God, but he had never come to know God through personal experience, and didn't even know where to find God!

Philip was one of Jesus' disciples. He had been one of the twelve who had journeyed with Jesus, sat at His feet as He taught, and served the Lord. Yet the very night before the crucifixion Jesus said to him, "Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip?"

John in his first epistle is writing to Christians whom he refers to as "my little children." They believed in Jesus and they had eternal life, but there was a knowledge they were lacking. John writes: "These things have I written unto you that believe on the Name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life..." They were saved through their faith in Christ, but apparently they did not know that they had eternal life - which says something about this matter of being saved and yet not knowing it.

John Wesley, before his Aldersgate experience, I believe, said that he wanted that religion which a person could not have without knowing that he had it. Surely that's the kind we all want: a know-so salvation, and, thanks be to God, we can have it; but there is such a thing as believing and walking by faith when the light of clear-cut knowledge may be dim!

2. Know by doing God's will

While the Christian life is a life of faith, however, I think that all of us in our more serious moments, have something of a desire to move on beyond faith into the realm of spiritual knowledge. We want not only to be able to say "I believe" but we want to be able to say "I know". We want not only to be able to say "I believe" and then live in the light of that faith, but we want to come to know the truth and the reality of that which we do believe - not simply in the world to come where we see "face to face", but to some degree, at least, right here in this present world. And, too, an unbelieving world sometimes turns to us and says, "How can one know whether the things you believe are really true or not?"

The Apostle Paul not only believed on Jesus; he also said, "I know Whom I have believed..."

Down in Charlotte at a Ministers' Conference some years ago I heard Bishop Roy Short say, "I believe I know in my life and in my heart as much of God's power and God's grace as I choose to know."

How does a person come not simply to believe but to know? What is the pathway that leads us to a knowledge of the truth of the great doctrines of the Christian faith that Jesus taught and that we find recorded in this Book? How can a person come to really know whether the doctrine of Christ truly came from God?

Our text is John 7:17: "If any man will do (God's) will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself". In these wonderful words Jesus points out to us the pathway to spiritual knowledge, the pathway on which one comes to know the truth of the things He taught. "If any man will do God's will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or, whether I speak of Myself," Jesus says. The pathway of spiritual knowledge is the pathway of commitment, the pathway of obedience, the pathway of surrender to the will of God. "If any man will do God's will, he shall know..."

This is a far different pathway from what some of us may have thought at one time. It is a far different pathway from the one that some of us have travelled trying to find out the truth of the doctrines of God.

I remember my own experience along this line. I accepted Christ by faith when just a boy and surrendered to Him in an experience which brought peace of heart, a love for the things of the Spirit, and an assurance that it was well with my soul. But when I became a young man and went away to college, I ran head on into a lot of doubts and questions as to the truth of some of the great doctrines and teachings of Christ which I had accepted by faith in earlier years. Were these things true or were they not? So many people in the world do not believe them. How was I to know whether I had simply been misled, and that the world was not right and the great doctrines of the Christian faith were not wrong? To say that I became troubled about the matter was to put it mildly. I remember the night I got down on my knees in my college room and cried out to God: "0 God, I want to know the truth of the matter, no matter what it is!" and I began to seek in earnest to find out what the truth was. But, you know, I began to read and search in books for the answer, and I failed to realize at that time that one does not come to know the truth of the doctrines of Christ along that line, simply by reading and by studying about them, and finding Out what this person and that person say about them, no matter how learned the writers might be.

One does not come to know God through human wisdom and learning. As we read in our Scripture: "For after that in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God ..."

You remember what the Scriptures say about the people at Athens whom the Apostle Paul preached to. In Acts 17:21 we read "For all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing." Yet despite the fact that they spent their time in this fashion, they still didn't know God! They still didn't know the truth!

One does not come to know simply by studying, wonderfully helpful though some books are. Those of us who are walking by faith may want to get rid of the cobwebs of doubt that we run into along the way of life, but we are not going to get rid of them all simply by reading and studying. And there may be those outside the Christian faith who say, "I'd be a Christian if I only knew for certain that the doctrines of Christ are true" who try to work the matter out and come to the truth simply by studying about it, but they will never arrive at spiritual knowledge along that pathway.

Another pathway we may try to spiritual knowledge is the pathway of going to an altar of prayer and crying out to God to remove our spiritual darkness and ignorance and doubts in a vision of light from heaven above. But that's not the way either.

Jesus said, "If any man will do God's will, he shall know..."

Back in 1952 I ran across a book written by Dr. John A. Mackay, who had been and perhaps still was President of Princeton Theological Seminary. The book was entitled A PREFACE TO CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY, and in it, Dr. Mackay dealt at length with this matter of how a person comes to know truth and particularly the truth as it relates to and is set forth in the Christian doctrines. He talked about the balcony approach and the road approach. The "balcony" approach is where a person sits in a little balcony and tries to learn about life and truth by sitting on the sidelines and studying those whom he sees travelling on the road of life. The "road" approach is where a person tries to learn the truths of life by actually travelling along the road of life himself. The balcony approach to truth and the road approach to truth as he described it is the difference between being a spectator of a game or a player in the game. And he said in effect that the person who studies life and truth simply as a spectator or as a student can never come to really know either, that the only way you can really come to know is to get out of the balcony and get down on the road and learn through experience.

Knowledge requires commitment! In Dr. Mackay's words: "The deepest truths about reality can be known only by people who start from a deep concern about life and who are prepared to commit themselves irrevocably to the full implications of the truth that satisfies their concern." "There can be," he says, "no true knowledge of ultimate things, that is to say, of God and man, of duty and destiny, that is not born in a concern and perfected in a commitment."

"If any man will do God's will, he shall know..." Not "if any man will learn God's will", not "if any man will study about God's will", not "if any man will think about God's will", not "if any man will pray about God's will", but "if any man will do God's will, he shall know of the doctrine..." One comes to a knowledge of a spiritual truth not simply by talking about it or studying about it or thinking about it or praying about it, but by doing the will of God. We can come to know only through a commitment that gets us involved in actually doing the will of God. We come to know as we walk the pathway, and unless we are willing to walk the pathway of obedience, we may form opinions and have ideas, but we can not know. Some things one comes to know only through experience and in no other way.

Most of you know how to swim. When the weather gets hot and you go to the beach, you know what it is to get out in the water and swim a little, though most of the time you may spend lying in the sun on the hot sand.

Human nature is a funny thing, isn't it? When the weather gets hot around home, one seeks the shade, and maybe works in an air-conditioned building, wants air-conditioning in his home, puts an air-conditioner in his car, and even wants air-conditioning in the church building that one may not be in over a couple of hours a week. But when the weather gets really hot, that's going to the beach weather where one can hardly wait to get out in the hot sun and stretch out on the sand and get blistered.

Well, most of you know how to swim and you can probably remember when you learned to swim. And you know that you never learned to swim until you actually got in the water and committed yourself to the water. You didn't learn to swim by just reading a book or listening to swimmers talk about it or by even praying about it. You learned by getting in the water and letting yourself go.

I learned to swim in a creek side by side with the leeches and the frogs and snakes. But I was a slow learner because I just didn't quite trust the water and every time my right leg went down in a kick, I usually made sure that my big toe hit the creek bed to support me. It took deep water where my toe couldn't touch bottom to come to the full knowledge that I was a swimmer.

Most of you know something about what love is and being in love. But if you really know what it is like to be in love, it is because you walked the pathway of love, not because you read it in a book or saw it happen to someone else.

Perhaps you have heard the little story of the preacher who was getting ready to go to the church one Sunday evening for the evening service, and his daughter and her fiance were sitting in the living room before the fire. "I'm preaching on love tonight," he said. "Are you coming to the service?" "No," they replied, "we'd rather stay home and practice it."

Preaching may be fine and studying may be fine and praying may be fine but real knowledge is to be found along the pathway of experience as nowhere else.

You can't really know the reality of swimming unless you swim. You can't really know the reality of love unless you love. And you can't really know what it is to be a parent unless you are a parent. Most of us have heard our parents say on occasion when they found it needful to give us a little strap leather or hickory "tea" or other discipline, "This hurts me more than it does you." And we didn't either believe it or understand it. But when we married and children came into our homes and it was our time to administer discipline, we came to know what it was all about.

So with spiritual knowledge! Without the commitment to Jesus Christ that causes one to actually do God's will, one may hold opinions about the great spiritual truths and experiences, but one can never truly know in the fullest sense of the word.

The person outside the Christian faith may say, "I would be a Christian if I knew the teachings of Christ were true," but he can not know until he makes the leap of faith and commits his life to Christ and begins to walk the pathway of obedience to God's will.

You can never really know the reality of the new birth until you are born of the spirit yourself. You can never know the assurance of the forgiveness of your sins until you have commited your life to Christ and found forgiveness. You can never know the witness of God's Spirit until you have surrendered to the will of God and His Spirit has something in your soul to bear witness to. You remember the statement of Peter and the other apostles recorded in Acts 5:32. "And we are witnesses of these things; and so is also the Holy Ghost, whom God hath given to them that obey Him."

Some years ago Dr. Charles L. Goodell, one of the outstanding preachers of our country, was talking with a man who was not a Christian. The man expressed doubt as to the reality of the Holy Spirit and the work of the Holy Spirit. Dr. Goodell said in substance to him, "If you will honestly fulfil the conditions which the Scriptures make plain, and wholeheartedly turn your back on your sins, and unconditionally take Christ as your Saviour and Lord, then I promise you that if you do not receive this assurance of sins forgiven and this assurance of a new life born within you, that I will never preach this Gospel again." The man went home to think about it. He decided to take the leap of faith and commit his life to Christ, and the next night he came to Dr. Goodell with a radiant face and said, "You were right! It works! It works!"

One of my dearest friends told me that he was converted as a young man of seventeen, but later let something come between him and the Lord and as a result lost the joy of his salvation. He said that when he realized what had happened in his spiritual life, he began to seek the Lord anew and tried to regain the assurance and the joy of his salvation - but didn't seem to get anywhere in his search. This went on for months without success. Then revival time came at his old home church and he and his wife went back to his old home community to attend the services hoping that through them he would get his spiritual life straightened out again. The services went on from night to night but he still seemed unable to get back right with the Lord. One day he was in a little patch of woods near his old homeplace, under conviction, miserable, but getting nowhere spiritually as far as he could see. He said he got down on his knees, and began to pray, and in his prayer he said, "Lord, I'm going to serve You and live for You and do your will whether I ever get back the joy of salvation or not!" And he had hardly finished that prayer in sincerity until the Lord blessed him and restored unto him his assurance and the joy of salvation.

Obedience! Surrender to the will of God! Doing God's will whether we feel like it or not, whether we fully understand it or not: this is the pathway to spiritual knowledge! "If any man will do God's will, he shall know..."

3. Growing in grace

And we need to remember and note that spiritual knowledge does not all come at one time in a sudden flash of light, but it grows line upon line, line upon line, precept upon precept, precept upon precept, here a little, and there a little as we walk the pathway of obedience.

When God spoke to Moses out of the burning bush, Moses didn't even know God's Name. And Moses didn't come to know God completely at the time he obeyed God and started down into Egypt, either. Study the Scriptures and you will come to see that Moses' knowledge of God and of spiritual things grew and grew and grew, here a little, there a little, as he walked down the pathway of the years in obedience to the will of God.

In 2 Peter 3:18 we read "grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ."

We grow in the knowledge of our Saviour and in the knowledge of the things of the Spirit as we walk the pathway of obedience to the will of God. As Albert Schweitzer so wonderfully put it: "He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: 'Follow thou Me!' and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfil for our time. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is."

It is in obedience that we come to know. We can sit and debate all day long as to whether the teachings of Christ will really work and never reach a satisfactory conclusion. But if we will simply begin to live by them, there will come to us the knowledge that they are true. We can sit and argue about whether the hungry ought to be fed and the destitute ought to be clothed and those in prison ought to be visited and the sick ought to be ministered to and make out something of a case either way depending on how we look at it - but if we just get busy ministering to our fellowmen in need out of a spirit of love and concern, there will come to us the sure knowledge that this is indeed the true way to live.

We can sit and argue about the brotherhood of man and make a case pro or con according to how we look at it, but if we will just begin practicing true brotherhood to all without regard to race or color, we will come to know the doctrine of God in this respect without God having to give us a special vision as He did to Peter on the housetop.

We can sit and argue about the pros and cons of tithing all we please, but if we want to know whether God really pours out a blessing on those who voluntarily and in love bring all the tithes into His storehouse, we need but begin doing it.

Some years ago in a revival service, I gave an invitation on tithing to the congregation. Among those who responded was a lady whose heart the message had touched. She promised God to place her tithes on the altar from that time on.

Later - perhaps several months later - she told me of her experience that night. She said she had been troubled about the fact that she was not tithing, and that she had gone to the altar and made the vow to tithe because she was under conviction about it and felt it was her duty as a Christian. "But, oh," she said, "I didn't realize what a spiritual blessing it was going to be to me and has been to me!"

"If any man will do God's will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of Myself."

One of the great spiritual leaders of our Baptist brethren here in America some years ago was Dr. B. H. Carroll. He was at one time pastor of the First Baptist Church in Waco, Texas, and taught Bible in Baylor University there. Then he left Waco to become the founder of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary at Fort Worth, Texas. In his early life, however, he was an outstanding skeptic and was known for his infidelity and unbelief. He doubted that the Bible was really the Word of God. He doubted that there were any such things as miracles. He doubted that Jesus was the Son of God. He doubted that Jesus' death on the cross was in atonement for sin. He doubted that there was even any real power in the Christian religion. He had even said that he would never again, as long as he lived, put his foot in another church.

His father died believing him lost.

But his mother did not give up hope for him. One day she got him to promise that for her sake he would attend one more camp meeting - which happened to be a Methodist camp meeting. He said he had no interest in it except that he did like the singing, but he went to please his mother.

During the Sunday morning service of the camp meeting, he was standing on the edge of the huge crowd that overflowed the wooden tabernacle. He said the sermon had nothing in it at all, and the preacher made a failure. After the sermon, the preacher came down in front of the pulpit, he supposed to exhort, but instead of exhorting, he began to ask some questions. He said: "You that stand aloof from Christianity and scorn us simple folks, what have you got? Answer honestly before God, have you found anything worth having where you are?" Dr. Carroll said his heart answered, "Nothing under the whole heaven; absolutely nothing." The preacher continued, "Is there anything else out there worth trying, that has any promise in it?" Again Dr. Carroll said his heart answered, "Nothing, absolutely nothing." "Well, then," the preacher continued, "admitting there's nothing there, if there be a God, mustn't there be a something somewhere? If so, how do you know it is not here? Are you willing to test it? Have you the fairness and courage to try it? I don't ask you to read a book, nor study any evidences, nor make any difficult and tedious pilgrimages; that way is too long, and time is too short. Are you willing to try it now; to make a practical, experimental test you to be the judge of the result?" Dr. Carroll said those cool, calm and pertinent questions hit him with tremendous force. The preacher continued: "I base my test on these two Scriptures: 'If any man willeth to do His will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God;' and 'Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the Lord.'" He showed that the knowledge as to whether the doctrine was of God depended not upon external action but upon the internal disposition - "Whosoever willeth to do God's will shall know".

Dr. Carroll said he made the commitment to put the matter to the test in that manner, not only submitting his will to God's will but pledging himself to persist in the search, "to follow on to know the Lord". The result was that before the camp meeting finally broke up, he became vividly aware of the reality of Christ and had accepted the invitation of Jesus: "Come unto Me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" and had found peace of heart and rest for his soul.

The things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.

How wonderful it is to realize that that which we accept by faith we can come to know through commitment and experience!

How wonderful it is to realize that the great doctrines of Christ which we believe are not only true, but that we can know that they are true and of God!

"If any man will do God's will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of Myself." Let us pray -