Getting to know God

By Andres Ramirez

Look for answers based on personal experiences and real events to questions such as : Does God Exist? How will the enemy attack you? How can I listen to God? How can I change my life? How to start having a close relationship with God?

Learn through this book how to change your life regardless of the circumstances in which you find yourself or how you can change the lives of other people. 

This book was written especially for those who do not know about God or do not believe in Him. Recommended for anyone who wants to learn in depth how to have an intimate relationship with God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BadPress
• Release date: Jun 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781071551608

Book preview

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated primarily to God, without whose guidance and wisdom it never would have seen the light. Also to my family and my son Gabriel so that you always keep in mind that God is number one in your life. Finally, to Melissa Gamboa, despite the distance you have always been one of the most important people in my life.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Prologue

God loves you

Is God real?

Getting to know your enemy

How to get closer to God

In Good times and in bad times

Armor of God

A difficult transformation

Getting to know God

The giants of life

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I want to give thanks to all the people who, inadvertently made this book possible, and to my Celestial Father for always being with me.

PROLOGUE

What does it mean to know God? Many people would say that to know God means reading His word every day to find out what He wants for us in our lives; let me tell you that you are right; to pray also means to know Him and to communicate with Him, go to church to congregate. There are many other ways and situations through which we can get to know Him, but this book is dedicated to how He makes Himself known to you, how He in His beautiful patience and love for us dedicates His time and presence to make Himself known to us. 

In our lives God gives us free will to do what we want to achieve, a lot of our actions can go against the path that He planned for our life, the same as a lot of our actions can follow directly the path that He wants for us to take, depending on our communication with Him, our shrewdness and our spiritual maturity in order to really understand which way we are supposed to follow if we want to please Him. A lot of times it can happen that we think that something is right but it is not, as well as we can think that it is wrong while it was right, this indecision is normal in the life of a Christian, we have to remember that being a Christian doesn’t make us perfect, but we are people who will always try to be like Jesus as much as we can every day of our lives, and we have to be humble in order to always recognize our mistakes, to always be able to feel when He asks us to correct them.

We are not always going to choose that right path that He plans for our life, but I promise you something that He will always do – He will never give up on you, He will always look for a way to find you, always will take care of you, always will be there for you and the best thing is, that God is not like a friend who you need to call from a cell phone and if you don’t have minutes in your plan you cannot reach him, on the contrary He is always available, listening carefully to your prayer, it doesn’t have to be in a certain place where you can connect more with Him, it can be in any place, any situation, any moment, He is there ready to listen to you and to respond to you, you just need to look for Him.

Life in Christ is not easy, we are always going to have resistance on the part of our enemy. Do you think that by surrendering your life to Christ there will be no resistance? The enemy will always be trying to lead you away from God, it will not always be through torment as is seen in movies, it can also be done through the things that make you happy, Satan is intelligent, he will see the most effective way to steer you away from God, he can even use the religion itself to lead you astray, manipulating you through the false prophets, it can also ruin your life, your economic stability, your job, your family; he can attack you in many other different ways. So that is why it is important to listen to God and to know Him. This is the only thing that will always maintain you on His path and will give you strength to endure anything that will come and lead you forward to a new life. 

My experience in getting to know God was a combination of good and very bad situations, in a lot of those situations I moved far away from Him, but He always in a subtle and perfect way found me and lead me to Him. So despite having taken a long time the desire to write this book has grown within me, to help you avoid those situations when they appear because you will be going through them, so that you know how to fight them holding the hand of our great Celestial Father. He never gave up on me however strongly I tried to reject Him, of course I had to pass my tests and I am still going through them, but my Faith in Him has never wavered, because however angry, sad, or confused I can be, I know that He knows what is best for my life and I trust in Jesus with all my heart.

In this book I want you to learn through my imperfect experience because only He is perfect, how to know God, understand how God works in us in thousands of ways, how to listen to Him, my experience of how I came to know 100% that God exists, how the enemy can attack you, how to have a humble heart, how to accept the people that God places in our lives and also those who He doesn’t place but whom we choose ourselves, how to always try to have our heart open for Him and above all because I choose to be loyal to Him.

Dear God, allow me by means of this book to help all the people who are looking for answers, who need to be listened to, who need to be understood and who need a break in life, so that through these words they manage to recover that hope in You, that your words are my words, that your ideas are my ideas, that your wisdom is my wisdom and that You witness yourself through this book. Amen.

Chapter 1

God loves you

On hearing this, Jesus said to them, It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners"

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Of course you can ask: Does God love me? Maybe this question is one of many that you ask or maybe you have never asked, but the answer we can see it primarily in Colossians 1:16, which answers our question through the following verse:

For in Him all things were created, all things have been created through Him and for Him

God was the one who created us and God loves His creation, as we can see in John 4:19

We love Him because He loved us first

Here we also have a confirmation that God loves you, God created you and He doesn’t create anything without a purpose, whether you choose to accomplish that purpose or not, depends on you, but He will always try to do everything possible so you can accomplish it and He will always love you.

Let’s start then from the very beginning. Surely you know the story of Jesus, when God sends His only son to be crucified for our sins, not only for the people who believed in Jesus in that historic time period, but for all the people because we are His creation, and God wants us to be saved in Him, that we all get closer to Him. I want you to understand that God loves you and wants you to be saved, it doesn’t matter if you have made mistakes in your life and they depress you, haunt you or torment you, He wants you to be saved in Him, He wants you to repent and be reborn in Him again.

Jesus is God’s son, born in Jerusalem, he always preached God’s love for His people, something that we believers need to testify. I don’t know if it has happened to you or not, but regrettably many believers don’t understand that Jesus came to cure the sick, cure the people who don’t live their life in Christ, maybe because they don’t know him or prefer not to; and since they don’t know him, then it seems they don’t know God, and so believers end up rejecting them. They can make you feel bad about yourself or make you believe that God’s love is a lie, depending on how their children or followers react. The same happens when you are a beginning believer and just because of that according to believers you are not at the same spiritual level as them.

But I am not here to reject you and let alone judge you, because the only one who can judge you is God, and He loves you, it’s not important to me what you have done before or what events in your life have brought you to where you are now, whether it’s good or bad, the only thing that it important to me is that you know Him and be saved.

One phrase from one of my favorite programs says: The monsters are not born, they are created, this is a phrase that can be used in this situation. Not all the lives are equal, we all grew up in different circumstances and had different opportunities in life, a lot of these situations define us, make us harden in our heart and soul. Many times we say that it is our fault, in my country we say ‘that was my luck’. And what happens? We are rejected, we are left, we are judged so we get imprisoned, a monster is created inside us. A lot of times we let it act, and although many times we want to heal, want to see the light that can pull us out of our darkness, the believers in God reject us, and with all the more reason we leave God because no one told us that God doesn’t ask for anything.

Well, I let me tell you that my case is not like that, I understand you and I will try to understand why you are like that in this moment, I will be there to listen to you, my attention will be there for you, I am not going to judge you, instead I am going to demonstrate that you are a human being who deserves love, understanding and hope. Maybe you are asking yourself how I can be sure since I don’t know you, it’s because God has shown me, that’s how God sees you and loves you as His creation, you are special, and God knows it.

Let me illustrate this example in more detail. There is a movie on Netflix called Risen, I recommend it to you, which tells the story of how a Roman soldier is assigned to find the body of Jesus. In the movie Jesus had been taken by his followers, to make the prophecy of the resurrection look real, and as a result a Roman general was sent to raid the houses where the apostles could be to find out what happened. In one of those raids the Roman general is able to see Jesus alive along with his apostles, exactly as the Bible says they appeared to them.

Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have (Luke 24:39)

The soldier follows Jesus to the Mount of Olives, which is the place where Jesus ascends to paradise. There is a village there where people are hitting a leper because he got close to them, they are showing disgust and fear of his illness.

Jesus saw that the leper came close to the village and its people to see if he could eat something from the leftovers, so Jesus took a fish from the ones that were being cooked, walked towards him showing sincere love. The leper was lying on the ground all beaten up, Jesus knelt, embraced him, kissed him on the forehead, offered him a fish, talked to him quietly and helped him to get up. The leper started walking towards his house, the Roman soldier following Jesus turned to look at the leper who was walking away through the meadow, and when the leper turns his gaze back, the Roman manages to see that he is completely healed.

His disease disappeared and he became a new person, but what did we learn from this scene of the movie? It gives us a great example of why God comes to this world - to heal you, to help you rise and make you into a new person. That is what God wants you to be in this life, it doesn’t matter where you are, what you are suffering from or what you are going through, he wants to be your Father, friend and savior. Jesus showed this in this scene and he showed this in real life because he loves you, and he loves you with all his heart, he wants you to rise up and become a new person.

Let me tell you about my personal experience of how God always loved me and protected me in spite of my being an anti-believer in a certain time of my life. In the seventh year of school in my country I was entering secondary school for the first time, it was a big change to switch from primary school to secondary school, and definitely the life in secondary school was going to be very different. In primary school we were more protected. What do I mean by this? In primary school there was more friendship, more respect between classmates, and there was no mockery between the students, but in secondary school it’s different, it’s normal to see bullying, and since you are already a student of secondary school, telling on your classmates is not an option because others will see you as a child, while what you want is be accepted by others.

So I entered school and I was assigned to a particular group of students for the whole year. In Costa Rica you are assigned to a permanent group for the rest of the school years, my group was 7-B. I didn’t know anyone in the group but I easily made friends, there was a classmate called Leo, he was older since he had repeated the year twice, this was his third time repeating the year. Being older he was the popular one in the class, everyone immediately joined him, including me, and became close friends. 

The first month was simple, a group of friends joking around, but one time I made the mistake of making fun of him, which provoked an aggressive response towards me on his part, this continued with a series of insults and nicknames which added to his popularity while everyone was bullying me. The rest of the year all my classmates constantly made fun of me, which lead me to a deep depression and made me resent God.

I was thirteen years old, I was still too young, the situation of being constantly bullied from day to day led me to become a so-called anti believer. I felt that God was not with me. Little by little I turned to obscurantism, although not completely, but I used to express my feelings through hate songs which I wrote down on paper, this was a way for me to release my feelings, and most of all I hated God. Many other things also happened to me which I will mention in another chapter.

To sum it up, I said that I didn’t believe in God anymore, which in reality meant that I was angry with Him, I threw insults at Him a lot and one time even threw the Bible that I had since I was little at the wall with a desperate cry, so now you can realize that the relationship I had with God in that moment was one of hatred. At this point anyone could say : God already abandoned you, but you are wrong. God loves me, and He didn’t abandon me, my mistake was not to go to Him, instead I blamed Him.

Let’s now imagine a child, maybe five or six years old, who does not obey his father, but although the father is maybe tired of the child’s behavior, he’ll never in any way let him get hurt, doesn’t abandon him because in the end, father loves his child. In the