Perfect Knowledge: Experiencing God Through Surrender

Perfect Knowledge: The Transformative Power of Divine Experience
There's a profound difference between knowing about something and truly experiencing it. Consider the difference between a fresh college graduate and someone with ten years of field experience. Both may have knowledge, but one possesses something deeper—wisdom born from living through challenges, victories, and failures.

This distinction becomes crucial when we explore what it means to have "perfect knowledge" in the Christian faith. The ancient Greek word epigenosis captures this beautifully—it refers not to intellectual facts but to experiential, transformative knowledge. It's the difference between knowing about God and knowing God intimately through lived experience.

The Inadequacy of Good Behavior
In the ancient world, the goddess Athena represented human wisdom, reason, and foresight. Her followers believed that divine intellect combined with structured behavior and strict moral codes could bring order from chaos. This worldview emphasized civil obedience, purity, and hierarchical authority—essentially, being a good citizen and maintaining an orderly society.

Sound familiar? It's remarkably similar to many approaches to spirituality that emphasize rules, regulations, and righteous behavior. There's nothing inherently wrong with these values. In fact, they align with much of what we find in religious law throughout history.

But something critical was missing.

When someone compared the major religious texts of the world—the Book of Mormon, the Quran, Hindu scriptures, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Tao Te Ching, and the Christian Bible—they noticed something startling. Almost all of them essentially conveyed the same message: be a good person, love others, help those in need.

Except the Christian Bible.

The Bible delivers a fundamentally different message: You're not a good person on your own. You cannot save yourself. You need a Savior.

This isn't meant to be discouraging—it's actually liberating truth. No amount of law-keeping can fix the brokenness within the human heart. As Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount, even harboring anger toward someone is equivalent to murder in the heart. No sermon, no self-help program, no amount of willpower can heal that depth of brokenness. Only God can.

God Lowered Himself
Here's the remarkable truth: God cannot lower His holy standards. Perfect holiness, justice, mercy, and love cannot be compromised without God ceasing to be God. His standard remains perfection: "Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect" (Matthew 5:48).

But while God cannot lower His standards, He did something extraordinary—He lowered Himself.

Philippians 2:6-8 captures this beautifully: Christ, "being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross."

This wasn't a momentary decision made in the Garden of Gethsemane. Hebrews 5:7 tells us that "during the days of Jesus' life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save him from death."

The days—plural. Jesus lived a lifestyle of surrender, regularly praying "not my will, but your will be done." This daily practice of surrender prepared Him for the ultimate surrender in Gethsemane, where the weight of what He was about to endure was so overwhelming that He experienced hematidrosis—a rare medical condition where blood mixes with sweat.

Even then, it took three separate prayers, three wrestling's with the Father, before He could fully surrender to the cross.

United in Suffering
Why does this matter for us?

Because Hebrews 2:17-18 tells us: "Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted." Christ doesn't just sympathize with our struggles—He empathizes. He's been there. He's experienced temptation in every form, yet without sin.

Consider the pastor who had experienced two miscarriages with his wife. When church members faced the same tragedy, he could sympathize, but he wisely sent his wife to minister first—because she had the epigenosis, the experiential knowledge of that specific suffering in a way he couldn't fully share.

Christ has that experiential knowledge of every human suffering. The betrayal, the false accusations, the physical torture, the emotional anguish, the abandonment, even the overwhelming despair that brings someone to the point of feeling their "soul is overwhelmed to the point of death" (Mark 14:34).

From 2 AM when He was arrested through six prejudiced trials, physical beatings, flogging with whips embedded with metal and bone, being stripped and mocked, crowned with thorns, and finally hanging on a cross for six agonizing hours—Christ experienced the depths of human suffering.

All so that we could be "partakers of His divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4).

The Path of Surrender
Second Peter promises that if we possess godly qualities "in increasing measure," we will never be ineffective or unproductive in our knowledge of Jesus Christ. But how do we increase in this experiential knowledge?

Not merely through reading more, praying more, or trying harder to be good.

Through daily surrender.

This isn't easy. It shouldn't be easy. If surrendering everything to God feels simple, we're probably not doing it honestly. Jesus Himself offered up "loud cries and tears" in His prayers of surrender.

True surrender means bringing everything—our striving, our ambitions, our pain, our fears, our habits, our trauma—and placing it in God's hands. It means praying, "It is my will to surrender to you everything that I am and everything that I'm striving to be."

This is a process, often painful, like peeling layers of an onion. God highlights different areas at different times, inviting us deeper into surrender and deeper into experiencing His transformative presence.

The Good News
The good news isn't just that Christ died. It's that He rose again and sent His Holy Spirit to dwell within us. The same resurrection power that raised Jesus from the dead now lives in those who believe (Ephesians 1:19-20).

This power enables us to be born again as children of God. It allows us to experience His love, forgiveness, and wisdom in real, tangible ways. As we surrender more fully, we experience more deeply the reality of being united with Christ in both our suffering and our transformation.

We are God's children. We are Christ's friends. We are being transformed into His image, becoming partakers of the divine nature—not through our effort, but through His power released in our surrender.

This is perfect knowledge: not mastering facts about God, but experiencing God Himself in the depths of our daily lives.