A Big Prayer
Kent Hughes(1) beautifully describes Paul’s all-consuming ambition, to know Jesus more:
‘It had been thirty years since his encounter with Christ on the Damascus Road where he once and for all came to know Christ. So “that I may know him” expresses the longing of a heart that already knows Christ—and in fact has known Christ more intimately than most of us! To know Christ was the overarching and unfolding ambition of Paul’s life — a longing for an ever-deepening, ever-widening, personal knowledge of the Son. This passion to know him was what energised Paul’s dogged devotion and his epic quest to take the gospel to the ends of the earth — “spires away on the world’s end,” as John Masefield puts it in his poem “The Seekers.” The apostle’s intense longing was born of love because love makes us want to know another more and more — just as in a good marriage we come to know another as “a true blood relative even closer … than father or mother.”(2) The apostle’s love-born desire was to know Christ in such a way that his life was so fully identified with that of his Saviour that it radiated him.
Paul’s longing has set the example for the church for more than two millennia. If we have anything of the same desire, let’s make this our prayer: “I want to know you, Lord — to really know you.”
1) Hughes, R. K. (2007). Philippians: the fellowship of the gospel (pp. 137–138). Crossway Books.
2) Mike Mason, The Mystery of Marriage (Portland: Multnomah, 1985), p. 26.