Knowing God is to enter into a whole way of life. It is the perfection or the completion of all other     levels of human life, physical, emotional and intellectual. It is being caught up in the liberating, tender love of God toward each of us. This life is revealed to us through the spoken Word of God made flesh, Jesus Christ. We can be sure that we know God only by keeping His commandments…. But when anyone does obey what he has said, God’s love comes to perfection in him. We can be sure that we are in God only when the one who claims to be living in him is living the same kind of life as Christ lived (1 John 2: 3-5).

To be in God is to accept Jesus Christ as God’s loving presence, which speaks continually – through His indwelling Spirit abiding in us – of the Father’s infinite love for us, even unto becoming a human. God’s life becomes our life in a prayerful experience of God’s enormous love that frees us from narcissism and anxiety. Christ lives in us to the degree that we live as He lived, in self-emptying love for others.

St. Paul summarizes for us this new life that Christ brings us:

As for me, by the law of faith I have died to the Law that I may live for God. With Christ I am nailed to the cross. It is now no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. The life that I now live in this body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loves me and sacrificed himself for me. (Galatians 2:19-20)

God’s Word brings us God’s life and divinizes us. It makes us children of God (1 John 3:1). To live in God’s life is to live in the light of Christ’s resurrectional presence and to be obedient to His inner direction, recognized by the indwelling Spirit.

One of the true meanings of salvation is to be filled with the light or knowledge about life that God revealed to us through the Person of Jesus. The light that God has shared with us through Jesus is the true meaning and purpose of this earthly life. What, in your estimation is the meaning and purpose of life?