I’ve recently started going through a Bible study I had started a few years ago and never finished. It’s a workbook called Behold Your God.
I want to use this blog post to share some of the things that really stood out to me as important that I’ve learned so far from this study.
To what end?
I’ve done a lot of studies about how to improve your marriage, find your purpose in life, be a better parent, avoid fear, etc. The main point the author of Behold Your God makes is that knowing God himself and glorifying him is the ultimate goal of our lives. Being a better parent, better spouse, or avoiding fear are great things that can result from knowing God. However, the point of trying to know God more shouldn’t be so that this knowledge can bring these good things into our life. God himself should be what we want, not what a relationship with God can bring us. I think this is a powerful point, that really struck a chord with me. We can get so focused on improving our prayer times, our Bible reading time, our witnessing to people that we lose sight of God. This leads into my favorite paragraph of the book so far:
We will find ourselves benefited by the time we devote to the pursuit of knowing God and the transformation which that knowledge brings. However, we are not hoping to use this knowledge of our Lord for some greater end. The goal of the study is not to relieve us of our emptiness, fix our families, grow our churches, or even to find our significance and sense of purpose in Him. The goal of this study is to see God’s name lifted high above all else. Therefore our desire is not to use God for our advancement but rather to forget about ourselves as we worship Him.
John Snyder in Behold Your God
This is a huge perspective shift from the way I typically think about my walk with God and growing as a Christian. Being a Christian isn’t primarily about me, it’s about the God who made us and was willing to give up his life so that we could know him. When I’m focused on myself, my own performance and my own problems seem so big. However, when my focus is on Jesus and his perfection and love, the problems begin to seem smaller and smaller.