Philippians 3:10  “That I may know Him.”

The supreme longing of the Christian heart should be to know Christ; to know Him personally and intimately; to know Him experientially in the power of His resurrection; to know Him in that deepest and closest of all ways, in the oneness of a sympathetic, heart-to-heart fellowship in His sufferings over a world with its back turned on God.

But I can only know Him thus when I submit to His Lordship completely, counting all things loss for His sake, living wholly for Him. This is open to all of us as we experience the rich, deep, spiritual joys which come to those who truly know the Lord Jesus?

I sometimes fear that despite all our busy Christian service, our attending meetings and conventions, our singing of worship songs, and our outward Christian activities, some of us, even though we are truly trusting on the finished work of Calvary for our salvation, may find, when we pass into the next life, that we do not know Jesus Himself – having so neglected the secret encounters with Christ here that we find ourselves strangers to Him there.

“That I may know Him.” Are some of us so full of ourselves and our busy service that we cannot see Christ in all His beauty? Some years ago, a certain lady and her little daughter were staying at the home of a friend. On the bedroom wall, just over the head of the bed in which they slept, there was a picture of the Lord Jesus, which was reflected in the large mirror of the dressing-table standing in the bay of the window. When the little girl woke on her first morning there, she saw the picture reflected in the mirror while she still lay in bed, and exclaimed, “Oh, mummy, I can see Jesus!”

Then she quickly kneeled on the bed to take a better look, but in doing so brought her own body between the picture and the mirror, so that instead of seeing the picture of Jesus reflected she now saw herself.

So she lay down again, and then again saw the picture of Jesus. She was up and down several times after that, with her eye fixed on the mirror. Then she said, “Mummy, when I can’t see myself I can see Jesus; but every time I see myself I don’t see Him.” That is the trouble with many of us. We block our own vision of Him. We get in the way of our own eyes.

We must first get ourselves away from obstructing the soul’s gaze. We must get to where Paul was when he said, “I count all things loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord … that I may know Him.” When Paul wrote this he had already known Christ thirty years! His longing was to know the mind and heart and love and friendship of Christ in ever-developing degree.

We say that Columbus discovered America; but not all America is even yet discovered. There are a thousand still-unnamed lakes in northern Canada. There are mineral and other treasures not yet named. So it is, in an infinitely magnificent way, with our exploration of Christ. We are supposed to be continually discovering new treasures in Him.

May this be our life-long motto: “That I may know Him.”