I loved God, but I wanted to love Him more. To love His Word more. To be like those I admired most because their lives exuded peace and joy in Christ. Mine exuded chaos and discontentment.

This wasn’t what the Bible promised.

Fortunately, God took me on a spiritual journey through His Word that led me to know and love Him in ways—and depths—I never imagined.

Later, as I was reading through the Bible I noticed the Lord do in certain characters’ lives what I’d seen Him do in mine.

I saw a logical progression of five stages that drew me closer to God and into knowing and loving Him more. Five simple—but life-changing—stages: know, trust, obey, experience, and love. 

1. KNOW: The more we know God, the more we will trust Him.

Every day we place our trust in strangers—bus drivers, cab drivers, and airline pilots. But we’ll never fully trust anyone more than we know them.

The more we get to know some people, the more we know we can’t trust them. But the more we know God, the more we realize He’s impeccably trustworthy. It’s the same with His Word.

God’s Word is supernatural and does a divine work in our hearts as we faithfully read and study it. The more we know and understand the whole Bible, the more our trust in God grows.

The more we know God, the more we will trust Him. (By the way, we can’t know God apart from His Word.)

This truth can’t be overstated. We will never truly know and love the God of the Word apart from His Word. The Bible is how He’s chosen to reveal Himself to us and to teach us all about His incredible attributes.

Those who know your name trust in you
because you have not abandoned those who seek you, Lord.
—Psalm 9:10

2. TRUST: The more we trust God, the more we’ll obey Him.

We’ll never willingly obey someone we don’t trust.

Hold a gun to my head, and I might obey you—unwillingly. Fear is a great motivator. But depending on what you demand, I might take my chances with the bullet.

If I fully trust you, however, you only need to ask me, and I’m very likely to obey. (Though it still depends on what you’re asking.)

God never asks us to do anything without a perfect purpose. We can trust Him. Each other, not so much—even though we usually try to be trustworthy.

God’s Word is true and trustworthy. Jesus Himself affirmed this when He prayed, “Sanctify them [the disciples] by the truth; your word is truth” (John 17:17).

In our modern culture, we’re encouraged to declare our own truth. This mindset makes it harder for us to understand and embrace Christ’s testimony about God’s Word. It isn’t just “a” truth. It’s the unchanging, infallible, and trustworthy Word of God.

It never fails.

It always accomplishes everything God sends it out to do (Isa. 55:11).

When my grandtwins were small, they loved to leap off the sofa into their dad’s arms. They trusted him so fully, they’d launch themselves into the air towards him—even if he wasn’t looking.

Fortunately, God is always looking.

The more we trust Christ and His Word, the more obedience flows out as a natural response to our confidence in Him and His Word. We leap to obey.

The stronger our confidence in God, the easier obedience comes naturally.

The more we trust God, the more we’ll obey Him.

Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth.
—John 17:17

3. OBEY: The more we obey God, the more we’ll experience Him.

As we walk in obedience to what He’s shown us to do through His Word, we’ll discover that everything Christ has revealed about Himself and His commands are true.

We’ll experience God’s Word as a firm foundation that holds us strong when the storms swirl.

We’ll be like a house on a hill that miraculously stands despite the hurricane that batters against it. We may lose a shingle or even a whole roof, but our faith won’t fail when we delight to walk in His ways.

God’s supernatural peace envelopes our hearts and minds as we trust in Him, even as our hearts cry out in the midst of our storms.

But faith without works is dead.

Our obedience, not our confession, reveals the true level of our trust in Christ and His Word.

The more we obey God, the more we’ll experience Him.

Jesus answered, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.
—John 14:23

4. EXPERIENCE: The more we experience God, the more we’ll love Him.

As we obey God and witness His Word proven true, our experience of His glory deepens our love for Him—and His Word.

Tears streamed down my friend’s face as she reflected on the grace God had shown her in the worst trial of her life.

“Who am I that God would do this for me?”

What had He done? He’d softened her hard heart as she obeyed His Word in Ephesians 4:32 to forgive the unforgivable—just as Christ had forgiven her.

Through her trial, she’s come to know and love God in ways she never knew possible as she’s obeyed His Word—even when she didn’t understand what He was doing. or why He was allowing her to suffer so deeply.

My friend loves God because He first loved her. Her love keeps growing as she knows, trusts, and obeys Him and His Word more because she’s experiencing His faithfulness more and more.

The more we experience God, the more we’ll love Him.

But whoever keeps his word, truly in him the love of God is made complete.
— 1 John 2:5

5. LOVE: The more we love God, the more we’ll want to know Him.

Love drives us to want to know the object of our love even deeper. It’s not enough to scratch the surface. We want to know everything about our beloved.

In our sin-stained humanness, however, we don’t always want to be fully known. We shudder at the possibility of our hidden thoughts and intentions being revealed. But not God. He delights to be fully known. (As known as finite humans can know an infinite God.)

There’s no greater joy for us than to know Him and to be made like His Son Jesus Christ.

The more we love God, the more we’ll want to know Him.

We love because he first loved us.
—1 John 4:19

Christ’s Call

As you read the New Testament, you may notice that Christ’s disciples dropped everything and followed Him based solely on His call. They didn’t come to know and trust Him first. They jumped in at stage three. At obedience.

When they obeyed Him, they experienced His character, and flickers (sometimes flames) of love grew.

They became more curious about Christ and wanted to know Him more.

Consider the man in John 9 who was born blind. He also jumped in at obedience to Christ’s call.

The man didn’t seek out Jesus. There’s no record he even asked to be healed.

Jesus went to him, applied mud to his eyes, and called him to obedience. To go and wash in the pool of Siloam (John 9:7).

Whether he obeyed out of faith or out of the desire to get the mud off his face, I don’t know. But he went to the water blind and came back seeing.

This experience made many curious. They wanted to know who healed him. He told them, “The man who is called Jesus.”

To him, Jesus was just “the man.”

The religious leaders demanded to know more. They interrogated him over his healing and who had done it.

The more he talked about Jesus, the more his understanding of Him grew, and the more his love and trust in Jesus grew.

He then called Jesus a “prophet.”

This got him kicked out of the synagogue, which was a big, terrifying deal. You don’t recover from that black mark.

It was bad enough he was born blind, and thus seen as utterly displeasing to God.

Jesus went to him and asked if he believed in the Son of Man. The now-seeing man responded, “I believe, Lord” (John 9:38).

He called Jesus, “Lord.”

And then he worshipped Him.

Jump In

It doesn’t matter where you start in this cycle, just jump in. And keep going.

I wish I could think of better words for these five stages than stages or cycle. These words seem to place an academic or clinical sense to what is truly a relational and intimate experience of God moving in our hearts and minds. 

Of His molding and shaping us to become more like Christ.

Of Christ drawing us to Himself.

Whatever we choose to call it, the evidence is clear. Those who seek to know, trust, obey, experience, and love God through His Word will find they soon come to know, trust, obey, experience, and love Him more and more.

His divine power has given us everything required for life and godliness through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.
—2 Peter 1:3