Pastor Tony Ross
In pursuit of “the Unknown God”
I have always been someone who has been searching for “the Unknown God.” I grew up in an environment that put rules at the center of knowing God. So I did my best to learn the rules and obey the rules. My spirituality was a minefield in which I stepped on all the right stones while frowning on those who did not. Yet the better I became at keeping the rules, the more God seemed unknown.
So then I thought that the path to “the Unknown God” must be in studying religion and philosophy and such things - information about God. So I began to read for hours a day. I attended the best schools I could find to study theology and learn ancient languages. My spirituality became a pursuit of the detailed and the trivial. Thousands of pages (and thousands of dollars in tuition) later, I thought I had found the secrets to knowing God. I set out with my monopoly on "God-information" at work for me.
The trick was, I knew about God, but when things started to happen – friends betrayed me, my job went bad on me, and my life stalled out – life didn’t follow my rules and it didn’t compute with the data I had collected. Once again, God seemed unknown.
I don’t know about you, or where you are in your search for God.
Maybe you have tried to find Him in your own efforts as I have.
Maybe you found God just as intriguing and mysterious as I did.
Or, maybe you gave up looking (I wouldn’t blame you, I did too).
Oddly enough, it was when I gave up that this “Unknown God” began to make Himself real to me. The door was not opened so much through the power of my mind (memorizing & intellect), nor through the force of my will (doing the do’s and refraining from the don’ts). God became the most known when I just trusted Him. It is the power of His mind (He knows me; He knows what I am going through.) and the power of His Will (He is doing all the right things, and He is breaking all my rules.) that is making “the Unknown God” known to me.