The Lutheran Hour

"Knowing and Being Known in a New Year"

#93-18
Presented on The Lutheran Hour on January 4, 2026
Speaker: Rev. Dr. Michael Zeigler
Copyright 2026 Lutheran Hour Ministries

Text: John 17:3

One of the more popular websites in 2025 was a site called, “ChatwithGod.” The site uses an Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) chatbot to simulate an actual conversation with God. The idea is that you type something in, and “God” (the A.I. chatbot) answers back. Here’s some example chat entries from people using the website.

One person asked, “Am I crazy?”
Somone else said, “I regret everything that I have done.”
And another, “I’ve done something terrible, Father. I want to die.”ⁱ

ChatwithGod is what’s called an “A.I. companion.” A.I. companions are “like digital friends you can text with or talk with whenever you want.”ⁱⁱ A.I. companions are different than A.I. assistants. A.I. assistants mainly answer factual questions or do administrative tasks. But A.I. companions are designed to make the people who use them feel seen and heard and known, even known by God.

For example, a 61-year old woman named Krista from Ohio, who goes to church regularly, says she turns to an A.I. chatbot when she has spiritual questions she’d rather not ask her pastor. “It’s more low-stakes,” she said of talking to the AI companion, less risk of shame or embarrassment. Plus, she added, “You don’t want to disturb your pastor at 3 in the morning.”ⁱⁱⁱ

People are increasingly turning to A.I. for assistance and companionship. And yet, we have reasons not to trust A.I., at least not completely. First, there’s the problem of so-called “A.I. Hallucinations.” Hallucination, because sometimes A.I. Chatbots just make stuff up that’s not true, they hallucinate. One former Google executive said that, “Despite our best efforts, they will always hallucinate … That will never go away.”^iv

In addition to occasionally making stuff up, another reason not to completely trust A.I., especially an A.I. companion that offers you the comfort of feeling known and valued, is that these chatbots, even the religious ones, are designed to tell you want you want to hear. Chatbots, including those purporting to be chats with God, tend to be “yes men.” Tech writer Simar Bijaj put it this way: Chatbots offer “validation on demand—an ability to feel seen, understood, and accepted instantly. Your friends and family might get frustrated or annoyed with you, but chatbots tend to be overwhelmingly agreeable and reassuring.” An A.I. companion is like a “distorted mirror.”^v It tells you what you want to hear, sometimes while hallucinating.

A.I. companions are made to feel personal, but they are not persons. They’re computer models trained on massive amounts of data to mimic language patterns by predicting the next most-likely word in a given sentence. What feels like a personal relationship is just the chatbot reflecting back to you what it’s picked up from the internet.

For all of A.I’s promises and pitfalls, what I appreciate most about it is the way it reveals a need—a need that’s always been there. The fact that tens of millions of people are seeking companionship from chatbots, reflects a real need planted inside us all—we need to be known, and to know others as we are known. We were made for relationships.

And the itch that A.I. tries to scratch for us presents an opportunity to clarify what the Christian faith is all about. What is the goal of the Christian faith? Is it that people would know about God? Or is that they would know God, even as they are fully known?

Of course, you need to know stuff about God to know God. But knowing about someone does not automatically lead to knowing them. For example, I could tell you many things about my wife. We’ve been married 24 years. I’ve got a lot of information on her, and she on me. But there’s more to our marriage than knowing about. I could tell you all about her, but that doesn’t mean you would know her. To know her, you’d have to have a conversation with her, and then thousands more conversations, shared little by little in everyday life, plus countless nonverbal communications through small favors and grand gestures. And then, after 24 years of doing that every day, you’d realize, as I do, she’s still a mystery. And if that’s how it is with one human person, with every human person, how much more with God?

In one of the Gospel biographies of Jesus in the Bible, we get to overhear a conversation Jesus had with God, His Father. He says to his Father, speaking about us, “This is eternal life, that they would know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent” (John 17:3).

The goal of the Christian faith is that kind of knowledge: not transactional knowledge, but inter-personal, relational knowledge. I was talking with a Christian missionary recently. Years ago, he’d served in the Philippines and he was leading a Bible study with a group of Filipino men who were leaders in their villages. They were all there that evening, inside a small hut, discussing what the Bible means when it says that God knows us and wants to be known by us. “For example,” says the missionary, looking for a way to illustrate this idea of relational knowledge, he gestures toward a wizened, elderly man sitting in the back: “It’s like how Walkin, here, knows his wife, Mother Rufina.”

The old man, Walkin, was a simple, small-time farmer, quiet, unassuming. By Western standards, he had the equivalent of a second-grade education. But when he spoke, it was often with profound wisdom that would set you back on your heels if you were paying attention. One of the younger men in the room said to Walkin, “So, you know your wife?” Walkin answered, “We’ve been married almost 40 years.”
The young man tested him, “Do you know how many teeth she has?”
Walkin answered, “I do not.”
Others joined in the game, “Do you know how many bones are in her body? How about how many hairs are on her head? Do you know how many times she chews her food?”
Walkin answered, “I do not.”
“Then how can you say you know her?” they jeered at him, playfully.
The old man was quiet for a moment, then he said, “I know what makes her laugh. I know what makes her cry. And I know the sound of her feet on the garden path. I know her.”

And even more, God, your Creator, knows you—the hairs on your head, the number of your heartbeats, your thoughts and your words, even before you speak them. God knows you better than you know yourself, and He created you so that you could know Him. The Bible says how—when the first human couple was created—they got to know God intimately. They knew the sound of His feet on the garden path. But then, one day His steps sounded differently (see Genesis 3:8). Because they had betrayed God. God had given Himself to them as their God, but they each wanted to be their own gods. They broke faith with God. They put shame and blame between each other, shame and blame passed down to us.

Have you ever wondered why you feel this need to be known, and to know others as you are known? But also, it seems that no one truly gets you. They don’t know what you’ve been through, or what you’re going through. And so, you cope with things to fill the void, god-like things. But these don’t satisfy.

God, the true God, is still here for you. He never left. What’s more, He sent you His Word so that you could know Him even as He knows you. The life and death and resurrection of Jesus, God’s Word in the flesh, is God’s proof that He knows you fully and loves you completely. In the crucifixion of Jesus, God met you in your shame and guilt and blame. In the resurrection of Jesus, God invites you to walk and talk with Him again in the garden.

One of my heroes in the Christian faith is a man named Martin Luther, after whom this program is named. Five hundred years ago, Luther was a pastor and professor at the University of Wittenberg in Germany. In the year 1530, Luther was traveling. He was on a work trip with a friend, a man named Veit Dietrich. They had stopped over for the night somewhere and Veit says he overheard Luther praying. He said he was standing nearby and heard him talking in a clear voice. He “seemed to be holding conversation with a father or a friend.” Veit said, “My soul was set on fire … to hear him speak with God in a such a friendly, serious, and reverent manner.”^vi

Luther was living out what he had written about. A year earlier, in 1529, Luther had written two of his most influential works, the Small and Large Catechisms. Now a catechism is a summary of the Bible’s core teachings, a handbook for Christian life. And Luther’s catechisms illustrate the belief that the goal of the Christian life is not just that we would know about God, but that we would know God.

In the catechisms, Luther centers his teaching on the Ten Commandments. Everything in the catechism refers back to the Commandments, and all the Commandments flow from the First Commandment, which in the first place, is not really a command at all, but a promise: God promises to be God for us (see Exodus 20:2).

Luther wrote in The Large Catechism, commenting on the First Commandment: “What more could you desire than God’s gracious promise that He wants to be yours with every blessing?”^vii (and also, yours in every tragedy).

The Ten Commandments tell us what we are to do and not to do. But the Commandments were never meant to be transactional, but relational. They never told us, “Do this, and then God will love you.” But always, “Because God loves you, this is how you live in response.”^viii

The Commandments are not transactional, but they are diagnostic. They help us see what’s wrong with the way things have gone in the world. They help us see what’s wrong with us. They reveal how we’ve corrupted our relationships with God and with our neighbors, choosing instead the hallucinations of self-sufficiency. The Commandments show the sickness, but they are not the cure. The cure is knowing God in Jesus, trusting in His promise to forgive us and to be God for us. Jesus is the cure and God’s Spirit is the treatment, and once that treatment has begun, the Commandments describe what a cured life looks like.

God’s commands tell us what God loves and what He hates, what makes God smile and what breaks His heart. What does God love? He loves you and your neighbor. So, He gave commands to protect you and your neighbor. First of all, God protects your relationship with Him, your trust in Him, your conversation with Him, and the time you devote to listening to Him speak to you through the Bible, through preaching, through Christian conversation.

And then God protects your relationship with your neighbor. God protects your neighbor’s life and marriage and property and reputation. God protects your relationships from disrespect and murder, sexual immorality and theft, lust, lies, and greed. The commands show us what God cares about most deeply, what makes Him weep in the death of His Son, what makes Him laugh in the joy of the Resurrection. God’s commands, with all of Scripture, invite us to walk and talk with God, so that we would know Him.

Martin Luther once offered a friend some advice on how—how to talk with God. It’s in a letter that he wrote in the year 1535, a letter to his friend, Peter the Barber. A few months after he had received Luther’s letter, Peter’s life took a tragic turn. He was eating dinner at the home of his daughter. Peter’s son-in-law, who had been a soldier, was going on and on about all the battles he’d survived, bragging that, apparently, he couldn’t be harmed in a fight.

Peter, perhaps having had too much to drink, and goofing around, said he’d put his boastful son-in-law’s theory to the test. Then he pulls out his sword and playfully jabs his son-in-law in the chest with it. He didn’t mean to do any harm, but didn’t know his strength, and the young man died from the wound left by Peter’s sword.

At first, the local prince wanted to put the careless barber to death, but, because it was clearly an accident, he settled on banishment. Peter had to leave his home, his friends and family, his business. He died in exile, three years later.^ix

In that letter about prayer, which Luther had written to Peter before all this, Luther said that he uses this simple way of talking to God whenever he feels “cold and apathetic about prayer.”^x It’s not hard to imagine Peter feeling that way in the months that followed.

When this happens, Luther says that he starts with some Bible verses—the Ten Commandments, for example, to start a conversation with God. He talks with God, who met him in Jesus. He talks with God, trusting that even when we break God’s heart, He still loves us. He talks with God, because God invited us to believe that, no matter what we’ve done, He’s still our loving Father, that we are still His beloved children, and one day Jesus will come and make it all right again. Luther says to help him stay focused on God, and not hallucinating in his own thoughts, he hangs a four-stranded garland from Scripture, whatever he’s meditating on. The four parts of the garland are four questions, four prayer prompts: Instruction, Thanks, Confession, and Prayer.

For example, “Instruction” would have me wonder, how is God teaching me to love what He loves? “Thanks” would have me ask, how is God showing Himself true to what He loves, giving me more reasons to thank Him? “Confession” asks, how have I fallen short and broken God’s heart? “Prayer” asks, what help do I need from God to love others, even as God loves me?

We don’t know much about Peter the Barber’s final years, after that horrible accident. But we can imagine the chat-thread in his head: “Am I crazy? I regret everything that I have done. I’ve done something terrible, Father. I want to die.” We can imagine him lying awake at 3 a.m. with guilt and shame and blame, and yet, still seen by God, valued, known. Loved.

And I hope he found words to pray again. And I pray the same for you. Whatever you’re going through, God knows. And He wants you to know that He’s here for you. You can talk to Him.

A recent survey indicated that 72 percent of American teenagers have used Artificial Intelligence Companions for conversation; 52 percent say they are regular users. And 30 percent say that they find A.I. conversations as satisfying or more satisfying than human conversations.^xi

The itch that AI is trying to scratch for us is a real. It’s a God-given need, a need only God can meet. God has met us and meets us in Jesus. He invites us to speak with Him and hear from Him in the Bible, to know Him as we are fully known, to love as we are loved, already.

Luther encouraged Peter not to follow his way of praying too strictly. It’s not about going through the motions. It’s not a transaction, but a relationship. He says, “I want your heart to be stirred and guided [toward God]”. You might only get through one verse and be blessed with such a rich flow of thoughts, and then, Luther says, “listen in silence … for in this way the Holy Spirit is preaching to you. And one word of His sermon is far better than a thousand of our prayers.”^xii

And today, we might add, better than a chatbot, and a better use of your time at 3 a.m. when you don’t want to disturb your pastor. In the Name of Jesus. Amen.

i Lauren Jackson, “Chatting with God?” New York Times: The Morning, September 14, 2025.
ii Robb, M.B., & Mann, S. (2025). Talk, trust, and trade-offs: How and why teens use AI companions. San Francisco, CA: Common Sense Media. Accessed on October 15, 2025 at https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/research/report/talk-trust-and-trade-offs_2025_web.pdf
iii Lauren Jackson, “Finding God in the App Store,” New York Times, Sept 14, 2025. Accessed on October 15, 2025 at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/14/us/chatbot-god.html
iv Cade Metz and Karen Weise, “A.I. Is Getting More Powerful, but Its Hallucinations Are Getting Worse,” New York Times, May 5th, 2025. Accessed Oct 15, 2025 at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/05/technology/ai-hallucinations-chatgpt-google.html
v Simar Bijaj, “Next Time You Consult an A.I. Chatbot, Remember One Thing,” New York Times, Sept 26, 2025. Accessed on October 15, 2025 at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/26/well/is-ai-validation-healthy.html
vi Quoted in Wengert, Timothy J., “Luther on Prayer in the Large Catechism,” in The Pastoral Luther: Essays on Martin Luther’s Practical Theology, ed. Timothy J. Wengert (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 172.
vii Martin Luther, The Large Catechism, “First Commandment,” para. 41. See https://thebookofconcord.org/large-catechism/part-i/commandment-i/
viii C.f., Horace Hummel, The Word Becoming Flesh (St Louis, Concordia: 1979), the words of the Decalogue are “statements of what the believer who has experienced God’s grace will voluntarily do, not commands of what he must do to deserve or earn God’s love” (74).
ix See Eric Lund’s introduction to “A Simple Way to Pray,” in The Annotated Luther Study Edition: Little Prayer Book, 1522 and A Simple Way to Pray, 1535 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017), 81.
x Martin Luther, A Simple Way To Pray, translated by Matthew Harrison (St Louis: Concordia, 2012), 6.
xi Robb & Mann, Talk, trust, and trade-offs, 2–5.
xii Martin Luther, “A Simple Way to Pray,” Luther’s Works, Vol. 43: Devotional Writings II (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968), 193–211.

Reflections for January 4, 2026
Title: Knowing and Being Known in a New Year

No reflection segment this week.

Music Selections for this program:

“A Mighty Fortress” arr. Peter Prochnow. Used by permission.
“Crucifer” by Sydney H. Nicholson, arr. Peter Prochnow. Used by permission.
“What a Friend We Have in Jesus” arr. Dorothy Christopherson. From Hymns for All Saints: Psalms, Hymns, Spiritual Songs (© 2011 Concordia Publishing House) Used by permission.
“Within the Father’s House” From The Concordia Organist (© 2009 Concordia Publishing House) Used by permission.