Why Knowing About God Isn’t the Same as Knowing Him
Feeling distant from God is one of the most common experiences in the Christian life, and one of the least talked about. It happens to people who read their Bibles. It happens to pastors. It happens in the middle of fruitful ministry. The doctrine is intact. The practice is intact. The closeness isn’t.
The standard counsel, when this comes up, is to try harder. Pray more. Study more. Confess. Serve. Underneath that counsel sits an assumption worth surfacing: that felt distance from God is a faith problem solvable by more information about God. Scripture, formation history, and the research on how human beings actually grow all suggest the assumption is wrong.
Most felt distance from God is not a doctrine problem. It’s a formation problem. The story you carry about whether you are loved, whether you are safe, whether your presence is welcome, whether closeness is dangerous — that story was written long before you opened a Bible. And that story shapes what you can feel about God, no matter what you believe about him.
Naming this well is one of the most pastoral things a ministry leader can do, both for the people they shepherd and for themselves.
Table of Contents
The Sanctification Gap That Hides in Plain Sight
The theologian Richard Lovelace gave the gap a name in the 1970s. He called it the sanctification gap, and he was describing something visible in congregations everywhere: people who could pass a doctrinal exam without showing measurable growth in love for God or others. The gap wasn’t in their information. It was somewhere else.
Western evangelicalism, for understandable historical reasons running back through the Reformation and the Enlightenment, has leaned hard on explicit knowledge as the engine of formation. We teach. We preach. We disciple through curriculum. None of that is wrong. The problem is what happens when explicit knowledge carries the whole load.
Todd Hall, professor of psychology at Biola and author of The Connected Life, has spent his career mapping this. His framing is clarifying: there are two ways of knowing God. There is explicit knowledge — what can be put into propositions and recited. And there is implicit knowledge — what we know in our bodies, in our reflexes, in the way we instinctively reach for or pull back from connection. Both are required for formation. The Western church has overinvested in the first and barely tended the second.
The result is a believer who can defend the doctrine of justification and still expect God to be disappointed in them.
Why Felt Distance Is Often About Other People
The implicit story most of us carry about God is built from the relationships that formed us before we could think about formation. A parent who showed up. A parent who didn’t. A caregiver who delighted. A caregiver who couldn’t. A community that received our questions. A community that punished them.
Attachment researchers have spent more than half a century mapping how those early experiences become an internal working model — a felt sense of what to expect from the people who matter most. That model rarely stays in the past. It rides into marriage, friendship, leadership, and prayer. We pray to the God we have learned to expect, not always the God Scripture describes.
Curt Thompson, a Christian psychiatrist whose work on neuroscience and spiritual formation has shaped a generation of pastors, makes this case in Anatomy of the Soul. We are storied creatures, he writes, and the story our nervous system is rehearsing right now is the story we will hear when God speaks. If our formation taught us that closeness is dangerous, correct theology will not, by itself, undo that lesson. Healing happens in relationship, in safety, in being known and not abandoned.
Dallas Willard, in The Divine Conspiracy, comes at this from a different angle. The gospel is not first a transaction we agree to, he insists, but a kingdom we learn to inhabit. Inhabiting takes time. It takes apprenticeship. It takes the slow rewiring of how we see, expect, and trust. Willard’s word for that was discipleship, and he was clear that most modern churches have not actually offered it.
So when a faithful Christian says, I know God loves me, but I don’t feel like he does, they are not failing at faith. They are reporting honestly that the implicit story has not caught up with the explicit one. That gap is where the work of formation actually happens.
What Scripture Says About Knowing God
The Bible does not separate knowing God from being known by God. It assumes the integration that has been lost.
“And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” — John 17:3, ESV
The verb behind know in that sentence is not the verb of information retrieval. It is the verb of intimate, lived, relational knowing — the same verb used elsewhere for the closeness of a husband and wife, and for God’s covenantal knowledge of his people. Eternal life, in Jesus’ own definition, is not first a category of belief. It is a quality of relationship.
Paul prays in the same direction. He does not ask the Father to give the Ephesians more facts. He asks that they be rooted and grounded in love and that they would know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge (Ephesians 3:17–19, ESV). Paul recognized a kind of knowing that exceeded what could be taught, and he prayed for it. He prayed for the gap to close.
Read this way, felt distance from God stops looking like a sign of weak faith and starts looking like an invitation. This is part of why the testimony itself becomes a means of formation — telling the truth about what God has done is one of the ways implicit knowledge of him gets built. The God who designed people to know him relationally is not surprised that explicit knowledge alone has not satisfied the ache. He placed the ache there.
The Practices That Actually Close the Distance
If felt distance from God is rarely solved by more information, what does help? The honest answer is that the practices that close the distance are slower and more relational than most ministries are currently structured to support.
Henri Nouwen, in Life of the Beloved, returns again and again to one practice above all others: receiving the voice that says you are my beloved before doing anything else. Not as a slogan. As a daily, embodied receiving. For most leaders, that voice is hard to hear at first because the voices that formed them were saying something else. Hearing it takes practice and presence.
Ruth Haley Barton points leaders toward a particular kind of solitude — not the kind that escapes other people, but the kind that lets the buried parts of the self come into God’s presence without having to perform. That work is harder than it sounds. It is also where the implicit story begins to shift.
And then there is the work of telling our story in safe community. This is one of Todd Hall’s central convictions, and it is borne out by the research on adult attachment. People grow more securely attached as they learn to tell the story of what happened to them — coherently, with both meaning and structure, in the presence of someone who can stay with them. Scripture has known this all along. Half of the Bible is testimony.
For ministry leaders, this raises a hard question. Most churches are not yet structured to hold this kind of storytelling. Most small groups still default to content delivery. Most discipleship paths still default to curriculum. Building communities where a person can tell the truth about their formation, and be received without being rushed past, is some of the most important work in front of the church right now.
It is also the work StoryQuest exists to support. When leaders begin telling the truth about their own formation in safe places, they begin to lead their people toward those same places. That is how a culture of felt distance from God starts, slowly, to thaw.
What Spiritual Growth Actually Looks Like
Spiritual growth is not the steady accumulation of more information about God. It is the slow integration of what we know with what we feel, what we believe with how we live, what we can articulate with what we can actually receive.
When a Christian says they feel distant from God, the right response is rarely a sermon and almost never a rebuke. The right response is curiosity. What story are you living inside? What did your earliest relationships teach you to expect from love? Where, in the body of Christ, can that story be told and held without judgment?
The God who walked with Adam in the garden, who wrestled with Jacob until the dawn, who called Lazarus by name out of the tomb, was never trying to be informationally apprehended. He was always inviting himself to be known. The distance is not the final word about him. It is the next conversation he is patient enough to have. This is the kind of formation work StoryQuest is built around — leaders learning to receive that conversation themselves before trying to lead others into it.
FAQ
Q: Why do I feel distant from God even though I know he loves me?
A: Felt distance from God when you intellectually believe in his love usually points to a gap between explicit and implicit knowledge. Your nervous system, formed through early relationships, is rehearsing a different story than your theology teaches. This is not a faith failure. It is the place where formation actually begins..
Q: Is feeling distant from God a sign of sin or weak faith?
A: Sometimes felt distance can be connected to unconfessed sin or spiritual neglect, but more often it reflects the slow integration of what we know with what we feel. Scripture itself is full of saints — David, the psalmists, Job — who described feeling far from God while still walking faithfully with him.
Q: What is the difference between head knowledge and heart knowledge of God?
A: Head knowledge is explicit and propositional. It is what you can articulate and defend. Heart knowledge is implicit, embodied, and relational. It is what you actually expect from God in the moment when you are afraid, ashamed, or hurting. Both matter. Christian formation works to integrate them.
Q: How does attachment theory relate to my relationship with God?
A: The internal working models developed in our earliest relationships shape what we expect from connection, including connection with God. If formation taught us that closeness is unsafe, or that we are too much for others, those expectations show up in prayer. Awareness of these patterns is part of how God brings healing.
Q: What practices help when I feel distant from God?
A: Practices that engage both head and heart help most. Daily receiving of God’s love rather than performance, solitude that does not require productivity, telling your story in safe community, and slow, formational reading of Scripture all help bridge the gap. The work is relational and unhurried.
Q: Should I see a therapist if I feel distant from God?
A: Therapy is not a replacement for spiritual life, but for many believers it has been a tool God has used to bring healing to the parts of formation that need attention. There is no contradiction between psychological work and spiritual formation. They often serve the same end.
Where to Start When God Feels Far Away
If this resonates with where you are, the most useful next step is rarely to read another book. It is to find one person, or one small group, where you can begin to tell the truth about what your formation has actually been like, and let yourself be heard. Then, slowly, lead others toward the same kind of space.
That is the kind of formation StoryQuest is built around — leaders telling the truth about their own story so they can shepherd others toward telling theirs. If the gap described here is showing up in your own leadership, it is a good place to begin.
The God you serve is not far away. He is patient enough to wait while the rest of you catches up to what your faith already confesses.
This conversation continues on The Ministry Growth Show, where the full interview with Todd Hall explores how attachment, neuroscience, and Scripture converge on a single, hopeful truth: God designed you to be known by him, and he is not in a hurry.
Reliant Creative is a Christian marketing agency helping ministries communicate with theological depth and pastoral care.
Sources
Scripture:
- John 17:3, ESV
- Ephesians 3:17–19, ESV
Formation Voices:
- Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy (kingdom inhabitation, apprenticeship to Jesus)
- Curt Thompson, Anatomy of the Soul (storied formation, neuroscience and faith)
- Henri Nouwen, Life of the Beloved (receiving belovedness as primary practice)
- Ruth Haley Barton (solitude and leadership formation)
- Todd Hall, The Connected Life / Relational Spirituality (explicit vs. implicit knowledge, attachment and faith)
- Richard Lovelace (the sanctification gap)
