experience, it's not a dirty word

“behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and call his name, Immanuel, “God with us.”
That statement was written by a poet, centuries before Jesus. For those who would have heard it, or read it, it required faith, trust, belief, hope and probably lots of other words that I can’t think of right off the top of my head. But in any case, it is a challenge to my intellect, whether to apply any of those words to my thinking, and it was a pretty wild idea that no one had any context to process.
No one had ever heard of a virgin conceiving a child, and no one had ever heard of God being with us, especially in the form of a child. Even in retrospect, I believe or don’t believe this statement, or prediction, based on my theology. My theology and intellect allow or disallow that statements in the scripture are true; they allow or disallow that Isaiah was a prophet of God.

“in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God… and the word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory.”
That statement speaks to experience. In this statement, Isaiah’s prediction is said to have come to pass. The first part of the statement sets out to establish who Jesus is, the second part establishes that we’ve experienced him.
I may have been told that Isaiah’s prophecy had come true, but received no other information about it. No accounts of the birth, life, or teaching of the child named, Immanuel. All reference to this miracle would be to the Isaiah prediction, and I’d have to depend on my intellect as to what it meant. But John didn’t refer to Isaiah to cause us to understand Jesus, he referred to Jesus’ life. He referred to activities, talks, and happenings in which Jesus participated, interacted with people – people who actually experienced him.
As a matter of fact, John actually states that he tells us of these things so that we might experience him as well. He taught what he taught so that the hearers might experience life in him. At some point along the way, he was taken out of the physical picture, but not before he made some pretty crazy statements, such as, “I haven’t told you everything, but many more things you will learn”, and, “don’t worry about me being gone, because if I don’t go, I can’t send the comforter.” So it sounds like he intended for us to continue to experience him even after he was gone, and not just in the narrative of the stories about when he was here, and not just in the emotions that those stories stimulated, but in his continued teaching and in his current comfort.
It is one thing to experience Shakespeare, to read his plays and sonnets and be moved emotionally by timeless beauty and challenge. But if anything in his work is an expression of him, it would be another thing altogether to actually know the man. It is one thing to experience God through ancient texts and metaphor and written revelation that are all made meaningful by a current spiritual knowledge, but to experience of the same God who wrote the story and recorded it for us to make sense of what we are experiencing of him right now. This is a story that may not have any meaning without the wordless dialogue that is going on in my spirit. A wordless dialogue that may not have any meaning without the instruction book that gives me a context and interpretive understanding. And vice versa… and vice versa.
In retrospect, all the scriptures cease to have any meaning outside of the experience of Jesus. Jesus said it was him of whom all the scriptures spoke.
It seems to me that if you’re a Christian, you either experience him, or no amount of written revelation means a blessed thing. Seems like even Jesus said something to this effect. “you know your scriptures but do not recognize the one of whom they spoke.”