How Do You Actually Start Knowing Jesus Personally?

From the Sermon delivered on March 8, 2026 | Come and See

There's a particular kind of loneliness that doesn't always show up on our radars: it’s the loneliness of knowing a lot about someone and still feeling like you don't really know them at all. Knowing Jesus personally isn't about accumulating the right theology or showing up to the right services. According to the Gospel of John, it's something closer to what happens when you keep returning to someone, keep showing up, and finally let yourself be seen. That's what this passage in John 1 is really about — and it has something important to say to anyone living a busy, searching life in New York City.

The sermon this past Sunday at Apostles Uptown — a church on the Upper East Side of Manhattan — opened with a question that stopped a lot of people mid-thought: Have you ever felt lonely in your faith? Not because you've abandoned it, but because the Jesus you know feels assembled from fragments. A meaningful moment at a retreat years ago. Something you heard in a sermon. The faith of a parent or a friend, filtered through their experience, not yours. It's possible to have a full mental file on Jesus and still feel like you've never quite met him.

John 1:35–42 is the passage where that changes — or at least where it starts to.

The Gospel of John opens with an almost overwhelming cascade of names for Jesus. In just the first chapter, he's called the Word, the Light, the Lamb of God, the Son of God, Rabbi, Messiah, the one Moses wrote about, the King of Israel, the Son of Man. It's as if the writer — the beloved disciple himself — is reaching again and again for a description that keeps slipping out of his hands. No single title captures the whole of who Jesus is. That's the point.

And if no title can capture him, then knowing Jesus can't be primarily a matter of getting the titles right. It can't be a theological quiz. The knowledge John is after is the kind you build over time, in proximity — the kind that makes you able to say, honestly, I know him and he knows me.

This is where the passage begins to move. John the Baptist's disciples have heard him point to Jesus and declare, "Behold, the Lamb of God." It's a command to look, to pay attention, to be interested. The Greek word used here carries the sense of taking a real, sustained look at something worth your time. Like standing at the edge of the ocean rather than the shallow end of a pool. You can see the bottom of a pool. You can't see the bottom of the ocean — but the farther in you go, the more astonishing things you find.

Jesus, John is saying, is more like the ocean. The invitation isn't to master him. It's to go deeper, knowing you never will — and finding that the going deeper is its own kind of joy.

Here's the detail in this passage that's easy to skip over: the text says the disciples positioned themselves again where Jesus had walked before. "The next day, again." It wasn't accidental. It was deliberate. They went to the place where they had encountered him, hoping to encounter him once more.

The word for this in the sermon was the discipline of returning. And it's the most unsexy, countercultural spiritual practice you'll hear about — especially in a city like New York, where we're wired for novelty, efficiency, and peak experiences.

We live in a culture that prizes the transformative weekend, the breakthrough moment, the retreat that changes everything. And those moments are real. But the pastor made a striking observation Sunday: in his own marriage he noted that after 23 years, the deepest intimacy isn't found on the trip to Paris. It's found on the couch on a Tuesday night, listening to each other's hearts.

Peak experiences are not the engine of intimacy. Abiding is.

This is why the ordinary rhythms of faith — daily Scripture reading, prayer, gathering for Sunday worship in an NYC church community — are not just boxes to check. They are the places where Jesus is known to walk. Returning to them isn't religious duty. It's the same thing John the Baptist's disciples did: showing up where you last saw him, hoping to see him again.

If prayer feels like a struggle right now — and for most people in a city that never slows down, it does — that's worth naming honestly. What we're actually doing when we pray is having an intimate conversation with the God who made the stars. Of course it feels enormous. The Lent guide available through Apostles Uptown is a simple, practical way to pray through Scripture if you're not sure where to begin.

Jesus turns around in the middle of this passage and asks the disciples a question that stops them cold: "What are you seeking?" Or more bluntly — "What do you want?"

It's the first thing Jesus says in the entire Gospel of John. And it's not an interrogation. It's a mercy.

Because if the disciples never answer that question honestly, they'll spend years following Jesus while looking for something he never planned to give. And the same is true for anyone who comes to Jesus with a pre-constructed version of him — the Jesus who agrees with my politics, who approves my plans, who never asks more than I'm already willing to give. When that Jesus doesn't show up, the disappointment is real — but it's not really Jesus who failed us. It's the version we built.

Jesus's question cuts through all of that. It moves the encounter from sight to insight — about him, and about ourselves. What am I actually looking for? And can I be honest enough to say it out loud?

The disciples don't quite answer. They respond with a question of their own: "Where are you staying?" And Jesus says something John clearly wants us to notice: "Come and see." In the original Greek, that word — see — is also the word for abide. Come and stay. Come and linger. It's a tiny Easter egg planted in the first chapter, pointing ahead to John 15 and the whole theology of abiding that runs through the gospel like a river.

The experience the disciples had that afternoon — whatever was said, whatever happened — John doesn't tell us. What he tells us is that they stayed until about four o'clock. And apparently, that was enough.

The passage ends with one of the most quietly stunning moments in John's gospel. Jesus looks at Simon — impulsive, anxious, unreliable Simon, the one who will soon pull a sword in a garden and then deny knowing Jesus three times — and gives him a new name. Peter. Rock.

Not because that's who Simon is. Because that's who Simon will be — with Jesus.

Most of us have been named by our worst moments. Named by someone's disappointment, or by our own. But Jesus looks at Simon the way he looks at all of us: not past what he sees, but through it — all the way to the end of the story.

His love is not heroic tolerance. It's not I really like you, but you're a lot. That's only half true, and if we're not careful, that half-truth is exactly what our faith runs on. Jesus doesn't see you through your sins — not because he's ignoring them, but because the Lamb of God has already taken them. What remains, what he actually looks at, is the person being formed in his image, healed and whole.

That person is not a fiction. That is the real you.

Knowing Jesus personally doesn't begin with a dramatic experience. It begins with a return — going back to where you last encountered him, and going back again the next day. It deepens through honest questions about what we're actually seeking. And it arrives, finally, in the astonishing discovery that while we've been trying to see Jesus, he has already seen us — and named us something better than anything we've been called before.

If you're in Manhattan and looking for a place to practice exactly this kind of return, we'd love for you to join us. Apostles Uptown gathers every Sunday on the Upper East Side for worship, Scripture, and the kind of community where you can come as you are.