How do I get to know God?

When I was a teenager, I remember reading through the entire Bible, but it had been a mechanical thing. This time, as I really started to read it for understanding, the words started to come to life and began to reach me in a way that they had never done before. As I read and studied the scriptures, I came to realize that God wants more than me just believing in Him. God truly desires to have a close, personal relationship with me and wants me to understand how much He loves me.

In my experience, all the close, personal relationships that I have had with other people began when we took the time to really get to know each other. Reading my Bible was helping, and as I began to read the book of 1 John, I came across a scripture that explained how to know God. In I John 2:3 (NKJV) it states, “Now by this we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments.” Ok, so in order to get to know Him, I would have to learn what His commandments were and how to keep them.

Reading a little further, 1 John 3:23 (NKJV) states, “And this is His commandment: that we should believe on the name of His Son Jesus Christ and love one another, as He gave us commandment.” Loving one another and believing in Jesus as the Son of God stood out to me as two very important commandments. I knew there were more, so I decided to do a more thorough search of the Bible on all of God’s commandments, starting at the beginning. With the computerized Bible software my parent’s had given me, I started my search.

(All scripture from The New King James Version. Copyright (c) 1982, by Thomas Nelson, Inc.)