Know Him
Each evening before bed, my wife Sheila and I pray. I always request that the Lord give us good dreams and that He will use them to grant us revelation of Himself. We pray about many things, of course, but I strongly believe our spirit never needs sleep and can, therefore, commune with God and that such communion can have a positive effect on our souls through our subconscious.
It might sound a bit mystical to some, but I assure you that many relationship revelations have come to me in my sleep. Just this morning, as I was nearing awakening, I was dreaming about pondering the way of the Father and the matter of Paul’s desire to know Christ in the fellowship of His sufferings.
Somewhere between AD 60 - 62, Paul, in Scripture in Philippians 3:8-11, spoke of how he had counted all things lost for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus his Lord. Then he goes on to speak of how he had suffered the loss of all things and counted them as rubbish, that he might gain Christ and be found in Him, not having his own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith; that he might know Christ and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, if, by any means, he might attain to the resurrection from the dead.
This matter of knowing Christ in the fellowship of His sufferings has intrigued many, and I have heard many different takes on it.
As I was dreaming, I thought of how absurd it would be to think of a Father looking at his son and saying, “If you really want to know me, son, you need to experience something.” In my dream, the father then took his son to be infected with a horrible illness, looked at him in that illness, and said, “This will help you know me better.” In my dream, I saw this as foolish.
It then came to my mind that Jesus was never sick in His earthly body that we have any record of. Yet almost every take I have heard over the years regarding knowing Christ according to His sufferings has involved the idea of sickness being something God uses to reveal Himself to us at some deeper level. Yet there’s not one place in all of the Bible that teaches us that one of the traits of God is sickness, nor does it teach that He has ever experienced sickness or that He had anything to do with the existence of sickness on this earth. One of God’s names is Jehovah Rapha meaning the God who heals.
When Paul speaks of knowing Christ according to His sufferings in Philippians, he speaks of how Christ had given up everything to do His Father’s will and come to this earth to reconcile us and how Christ humbled Himself even to the point of death on the cross. Paul had just spoken of how he had counted all things lost. The things he had counted lost were things that he, as a man, could have boasted in foolishly as though they merited the favor of God for him. Being conformed to the death of Christ is a matter of being willing to even die with the same attitude as Christ. “Nevertheless, Lord, not my will, but Your will be done.” Jesus suffered in Gethsemene even to the point of sweating drops of blood to reach that place of being reconciled to the will of the Father to die on the cross. Paul was getting nearer to his death and had suffered other things like a shipwreck, prison, being bitten by a viper, being stoned, whipped, and falsely accused, but he hadn’t yet faced the finality of death. He was in prison and would face the loss of his head in AD 64, just a short time after he penned this letter to the Philippians. He knew his death was close at hand for certain this time.
The quest of Paul was to know Christ in the fellowship of His sufferings being conformed to His death.
This man knew Christ well, and here he is about to complete his journey of fellowship with Jesus on this earth. This is not a sickness passage! It is a reconciliation to God’s will for my life, even to the point of my death, from the place of fellowship with Christ’s passage! It is a knowing His goodness passage to the extent that powerful enabling grace walks me through the valley of the shadow of death without any fear of evil because I know He is with me! Oh, that I might know Him!
