God wants us to know him personally even though we don’t want to know him. He makes himself known to us through Jesus and he makes himself known in us by His Spirit. Jesus is The Truth and the Spirit is the Spirit of Truth who will guide us into all the truth in Jesus. He will glorify Jesus within us and among us by making the things of Jesus known to us.  He will glorify Jesus in this way so that we see, in Jesus, the glory of God himself. So we don’t decide what the glory of God is.  No!  God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ. The Spirit lights up the face of Jesus in personal encounters.  And in that beautiful face, we see the glory of God.

 We only know God because God first acted towards us through his Son and also within us by his Spirit to make himself known.  And God makes himself known more and more as the living Jesus encounters us again and again in the Spirit.  We don’t begin with our own ideas of God nor do we continue with our own ideas of God.  We are always radically dependent on God making himself known to us through Jesus in the Spirit. That means God is not at our disposal.  We don’t “possess” the knowledge of God by ourselves to make use of it for ourselves. God moves out of his own fullness to make himself known.  Only then do we gaze on the glory of God lost in wonder love and praise.