Transcription
Jesus said the most terrifying sentence I have ever read. He said that on the last day, the final accounting, when everything is settled, people will come to him. Not strangers, not people who ignored God their whole lives, people who called him Lord, people who prophesied in his name, who cast out demons, who performed miracles. Active, committed, visible Christians, and they'll stand before him expecting to be recognized, and he'll look at them and say, "I never knew you. Depart from me." Not you sinned too much, not you weren't consistent enough, not you missed too many Sundays. "I never knew you." Matthew 7:21-23.
It's in your Bible right now, and it should stop every single one of us in our tracks, because it raises a question most Christians never seriously ask. Do I actually know God? Or do I just know about him?
Before we go any further, I need to show you something in the original language, because it changes everything. The word Jesus used for "knew" in that passage is the Greek word *ginosko*. And *ginosko* doesn't mean intellectual knowledge. It doesn't mean information in your head. It means experiential, personal, relational knowing. The kind of knowing that comes from being with someone, from dealing with someone, from having history with someone. It's the same word used in the Gospels when it says Mary knew no man before the conception of Jesus. The deepest possible level of personal intimacy.
So, when Jesus says, "I never knew you," he isn't saying, "I never heard of you." He's saying, "We were never close. You were never actually in relationship with me. You did things in my name, but you didn't know me, and I didn't know you."
Now, here's the thing that should shake every one of us. The people Jesus was describing weren't casual. They weren't lukewarm. They had done spectacular things: prophecy, deliverance, miracles. These aren't pew warmers. These are people who would have sat in the front row, who would have led small groups, who would have been on stage. And Jesus looked at all of it and said, "That wasn't a relationship. That was activity."
So, how do you tell the difference? How do you know, really know, whether what you have with God is genuine relationship or just religious performance? I want to give you four honest tests, not to condemn you, but because a question this important deserves a real answer.
Test number one. Do you talk to God, or do you talk *at* him? There's a man in scripture named Moses, and the Bible says something about Moses that it says about almost no one else. Exodus 33:11. "The Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend." Face to face, as a friend, not through ritual, not through formula, not through the right words in the right order, friend to friend.
Now, consider what Moses' prayer life actually looked like. When God told him he was going to destroy Israel after the golden calf, Moses didn't fold his hands and say, "Lord, your will be done." He argued. He said, "Why should the Egyptians be able to say you brought them out just to destroy them? Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, to whom you swore?" He reasoned with God. He pushed back. And the Bible says God relented. Moses talked *with* God, not *at* him.
Now, contrast that with what Jesus criticized about the Pharisees in Matthew 6. He said they loved to pray standing on street corners to be seen by others. Long prayers, public prayers, impressive prayers, God's name all over them, but there was no relationship in it. It was performance. Words aimed at an audience, and God just happened to be the excuse.
Here's the honest question. When you pray, are you having a conversation or reciting a script? Is there any back and forth? Do you ever sit quietly and actually listen? Do you ever tell God something you'd be embarrassed for other people to hear because it's that real and that personal? Because a relationship where only one person ever talks isn't a relationship. It's a monologue with God as the audience. The people in Matthew 7 said plenty in God's name. Publicly, powerfully, but there's no indication they ever listened. There's no indication they knew what he actually wanted from them because they spent all their time telling him what they had done. If your prayer life is mostly you listing things—requests, confessions, thanks in a formula—and almost never listening, almost never raw, almost never honest enough to be uncomfortable, it might be worth asking whether you've been talking to a person or performing for a concept.
Test number two. Does knowing him actually change how you see everything else? J.I. Packer, one of the most careful theologians of the 20th century, wrote something about this that I've never forgotten. He said, "Knowing God is more than knowing about him. It is a matter of dealing with him as he opens up to you and being dealt with by him." Dealing with him. Being dealt with by him. Real relationship changes you. It has to. You cannot spend genuine time with a person, any person, without being shaped by them. Their priorities start to matter to you. Their dislikes start to bother you. Their vision starts to become your vision. Not because you're trying to perform for them, but because proximity is transformative.
When Abraham walked with God, he became someone who would offer his only son on an altar, because he trusted God's character so completely. Not because a rule told him to, because he knew God well enough to know that God was trustworthy, even when it made no sense. When David knew God, it showed up in his Psalms, not in neat theological statements, but in raw, desperate, furious, grateful prayers. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" That's not someone reciting doctrine. That's someone in a relationship that goes deep enough to include real pain and real confusion and real honesty. And when Paul knew God, after meeting him on the Damascus Road, everything he had considered valuable became what he described as rubbish by comparison. His credentials, his education, his position, all of it. Garbage. Not because he was performing humility, but because he had encountered something so real that it reorganized his entire sense of value. Real knowing reorganizes you from the inside.
So, here's the test. Has knowing God changed anything? Not just your behavior on Sunday morning. Not just the things you don't do anymore, but your actual interior world—what you value, what you fear, what brings you joy, what breaks your heart. Because here's the painful truth about the people in Matthew 7. Jesus didn't say their works were fake. He didn't dispute that they prophesied. He just said he never knew them, which means it's possible to do real spiritual things without being changed by them. Without letting them touch the actual interior of who you are. Information about God rarely changes you. Relationship with God always does. If your faith is an external set of behaviors that sits on top of a life that's otherwise unchanged—the same fears, the same priorities, the same things you worship—it might be worth asking whether you've been dealing with information about God or dealing with God himself.
Test number three. Do you actually know what he's like? This sounds simple. It isn't. There's a difference between knowing God's attributes and knowing God's character. Attributes are facts: omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, eternal. You can memorize those without knowing him at all. A person could study a celebrity's biography, every fact, every timeline, every interview, and still have no relationship with that person. Character is different. Character is what you discover about a person through time and experience. It's how they respond under pressure. What they're like when they disappoint you, whether they come through. What they find funny, what they find heartbreaking.
Moses knew God's character so well that when God said, "I will destroy Israel," Moses could argue back, and he knew exactly which of God's own values to appeal to. He knew God well enough to know what God actually cared about. That's not someone who had studied facts. That's someone who had spent time.
In John 15:15, Jesus draws this line explicitly. He says, "I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends. For everything that I learned from my Father, I have made known to you." The distinction between servant and friend is not activity. Servants do plenty of activity. The distinction is knowing the master's business. Knowing what he actually cares about, being brought into his confidence. That's what friendship means.
So, here's the honest question. Do you know what God is actually like? Not just the theological answers, but real knowledge born from experience. Do you know how he responds when you come to him broken? Do you know the difference between what he's truly said to you and what you've constructed he would say? Do you know when he's pleased and when he's grieving, not from a doctrine, but from a felt sense developed over time? When you read the Psalms, David doesn't sound like someone reciting theology. He sounds like someone describing a person he's been through things with. "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me." That's not a statement about an attribute. That's a statement about a person he's come to trust through experience. The people in Matthew 7 did things in Jesus' name, but there's no indication they knew him. No indication they had the kind of closeness where you know what someone is actually like, not what you've projected onto them, not what you've been told, but what you have personally discovered through the slow accumulation of real time together.
Test number four. And this might be the most important one. Are you known by him? Relationship is always two-directional. You know someone and they know you. But we often talk about knowing God as if it only goes one direction, as if it's entirely about what we know, and we miss the other half. Galatians 4:9. Paul makes a striking correction in his own sentence. He starts to say, "Now that you know God," and then he immediately restates it: "Or rather, now that you are known by God." He catches himself. Because in a relationship with God, being known by him is actually primary. He knew you before you were formed. He knows the number of hairs on your head. He searches your heart. He knows the difference between what you show people and what you actually are.
And here's what that means practically. To be genuinely in relationship with God is to be genuinely seen by him. Not the version of you that shows up on Sunday. Not the version of you that posts Bible verses. The actual you. The private you. The you that has the thoughts you would never say out loud. The question isn't just, "Do I know God?" The question is, "Am I living in a way that actually allows him to know me?" Am I bringing my real self into this relationship? Or have I been carefully managing what God sees? Because performance, by definition, is a way of controlling what someone sees. And you cannot be genuinely known by someone you're performing for.
This is the deepest problem with the people in Matthew 7. They came to Jesus listing what they had done. Their credentials. Their spiritual resume. "Did we not prophesy in your name? Cast out demons? Many mighty works?" They were presenting their performance. And Jesus said, "I never knew you." Not because he didn't observe their works, but because they had never stopped performing long enough to be genuinely with him.
Being known by God requires honesty. It requires bringing the broken parts, not just the impressive parts. It requires the kind of prayer where you're not trying to sound spiritual. Where you're not curating your confession, where you're just in front of him as you actually are. David was called a man after God's own heart. David was also a murderer, an adulterer, and a man whose family fell apart spectacularly. What made him a man after God's own heart was not his perfection. It was that he never stopped being real with God. He brought his sin to God. He brought his anger to God. He brought his confusion to God. He allowed God to know him. That's the relationship.
Now, I need to say something important. Because I don't want you to walk away from this in fear. I want you to walk away from this into something better. Jesus said, "I never knew you," to people who were relying on their performance. He didn't say it to people who were struggling. He didn't say it to people who doubted. He didn't say it to people whose faith was fragile or whose prayer life was inconsistent. He said it to people who had replaced relationship with activity and never noticed the difference.
The prodigal son came home broken and bankrupt and rehearsing a speech about how he'd lost the right to be called a son. And his father saw him while he was still a great way off and ran to him. Before the speech, before the repentance was formalized, the father ran because he knew his son. Knew his walk, his silhouette, the way he moved from a distance. That's the God of the Bible. He's not sitting at a distance waiting for your credentials. He's looking toward the road, watching for you to turn.
The question from Matthew 7 is not meant to condemn you into performance anxiety. It's meant to invite you out of performance entirely into something realer, more honest, more costly, and infinitely more alive. Not doing more things in his name, but knowing him. Being known by him.
J.I. Packer wrote, "The width of our knowledge about God is no gauge of the depth of our knowledge of him." You could know every book of the Bible, every doctrine, every theological argument, and still have Jesus look at you and say, "I never knew you." Or you could be someone whose theology is limited, whose prayer life is a mess, who has more questions than answers, and who comes to God every day in honest, fumbling, real pursuit. That person is being known.
The four questions are simple: Do you talk *with* him or talk *at* him? Does knowing him change how you see everything else? Do you know what he's actually like? And are you allowing yourself to be known? Not perfectly, not always, but honestly. That's where relationship lives.