Experiential Spirituality

The kind of “living in Christ” patterned by Jesus in his relationship with his Father belongs to the experiential side of Christian spirituality. That is to say, it belongs to the practical, living-out-in-life side of our relationship with God.

Author and theologian J.I. Packer has commented that evangelicals today are “less sure-footed” in this dimension of Christian living than were their forebears. Evangelical Christians have focused on knowledge and doctrine and the Bible, resulting in a strong cognitive or intellectual dimension to their faith. For many, the Christian life is largely a matter of knowing the Bible and applying it to daily life.

That’s all very well and good. But one aspect of the “truth” that evangelicals warmly embrace is the fact that God is a personal being who desires our love, worship and fellowship. The goal of theology is really to know God in this kind of way. To put it another way, the ultimate aim of informed evangelicals is to “walk with God”. And that inevitably brings us into the realm of experiential Christianity – the experience of knowing God in the practicalities of everyday life.

One reason why many are hesitant in this area is the fact that experienced relationship with God brings us into the realm of interaction with him. We call upon God, and he hears us and draws near to us. He is a dynamic and living reality in daily life. That necessarily supposes that he will guide us and comfort us – and yes, even “speak to us.” And it is that in particular that makes many evangelical Christians wary. Such “experiences” of God at work in our lives appear to threaten the sufficiency of Scripture. As evangelicals we firmly believe that the written Scriptures are complete and totally sufficient for every aspect of life and godliness. That to our mind, rules out any possibility of more direct, personal communications between God and us on a daily basis.

I wholeheartedly concur that the Scriptures are complete and sufficient. But in what sense is that true? We confess that they are a complete record of all that God wants to tell us about himself and his redemptive work in Christ. They take us from the beginning of the works of God in creation to their consummation in the new heaven and earth. There is nothing more we need to know about what God has done, is doing, and will do in his redemptive work in Christ. And all we need to know to live in covenant with God as his redeemed people is made plain in the writings of the law, the prophets, the gospels and the epistles. In that sense the Scriptures are finished and totally sufficient. We need nothing else.

But if the Scriptures reveal anything, they reveal that the true and living God is personal and relates to those who are in covenant fellowship with him. The spirituality of the Bible is not an impersonal spirituality of living by doctrines and rules contained in a book. Abraham and David, John and Paul lived in intimate personal fellowship with God. God’s self-disclosure, be it through theophany, vision, dream, prophecy or through the incarnation of his Son, was always to the end that we might know him and respond to him. He has even come to live within us through the Spirit in this new covenant age. By means of his word, the Spirit draws us into and sustains us in living fellowship with the Father and his Son.

That necessarily means that true Christianity is ultimately experiential in character – it involves experienced relationship with God.