The two essential ingredients are time and obedience. It takes time to cultivate a relationship, and unless we set aside consistent time for disciplines such as solitude, silence, prayer, and the reading of Scripture, we will never become intimate with our Lord. Obedience is the proper response to this communication, since it is our personal expression of trust in the promises of the Person we are coming to know. The more we are impressed by [God], the less we will be impressed by people, power, and things....To know God is to love [God], because the more we grasp—not merely in our minds but also in our experience—who [God] is and what [God] has done for us, the more our hearts will respond in love and gratitude. "We love because [God] first loved us" (1 John 4:19)....If we love Jesus, we will keep his commandments (John 14:15); [Jesus] taught us that obedience to his commands is the way we test and express our abiding relationship with him (John 15:10). Our great task in the spiritual life is to will to do [God's] will, to love the things [God] loves, and to choose the things [God] sets before us for our good. (Kenneth Boa, Conformed to His Image, (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2001), pp. 32, 33).
As St. Richard of Chichester prayed to the Lord Jesus Christ, "May I know thee more clearly, love thee more dearly, and follow thee more nearly, day by day."