| << | Contents | >> |
Exchanged Glory III: Wise as Serpents
<page 111>Studying theology is a way of letting God’s people help in this process. … By carefully considering the wisdom of others, I pick up insights I wouldn’t have seen on my own.
The experience I described in the previous chapter helped me to realize that my love of simplicity could have hurt my family badly. If I hadn’t done the work to sort through the scriptures about money, I might have missed the tremendous blessing of my house. If I hadn’t learned what Jesus meant when He told us to love our enemies, my simple and apparently literal interpretation of Matthew 5:38-44 could have cost my wife and children their lives. I wondered what other theological mistakes I was making and who was being hurt by them.
I asked myself why my friends at church had understood what Jesus was saying even though they couldn’t give what I thought were scriptural reasons for their beliefs. I concluded that it had to do with the fact that most of them had grown up in families that attended church. An understanding of Christianity had been drilled into them from the earliest age, so they had a way of thinking that tended to lead to godly common-sense answers. On moral issues, the inner insight from their background gave them a “gut feel” for the truth that usually brought them to the right conclusions.
That’s why they could get by with simple sayings like, “All we need to do is to love God and love our neighbor.” Their upbringing had taught them what love looked like; they just needed God’s power to help them do it. I, on the other hand, didn’t know what love looked like. I was from a non-Christian background, and my “gut feel” led to bizarre conclusions (especially about sex). I had to rely on the actual words of the Bible rather than intuition. It wasn’t an option for me to read, “I tell you not to resist an evil person,” and to say, “I don’t feel like Jesus means what He appears to be saying.” If I took that approach with other parts of the Bible, I would end up in disaster. The actual words rather than my feelings about them were what kept me safe.
My friends tended to talk badly about the church traditions they had grown up in. They had trouble separating themselves from their backgrounds when they had good reason to do so. I came to the conclusion that those who are trying to escape from tradition generally don’t know its value. They take the good for granted and only tend to see the bad. Looking in from the outside, I had a different perspective. I could see that the train tracks running through their hearts protected them from the sorts of mistakes I tended to make. They possessed a mindset that had been a part of Christianity for centuries – and I wanted it.
My background wasn’t the only thing that misled me. My gift for creativity also got me into trouble. It has always been easy for me to play with ideas in my head and to come up with novel <page 112>approaches. I have been able to study a subject, rearrange it several different ways, and find possibilities that most miss.
This ability helped greatly on my job, where creative solutions solved difficult problems. It was natural for me to “think outside the box.” The same ability, however, was risky in theology and morality, where any new idea had to be an expression of God’s unchanging word. I had often been not just “outside the box” – I had trouble finding the box.
Life had too many possibilities for me. By the time I was an adult, I had been exposed to scores of different philosophies, religions, and theologies. When I talked to people, I could climb out of my own worldview, see life through their eyes, and understand their point of view. This was helpful for relationships, because my heart was able to empathize with them. But after doing so, I couldn’t tell them what was right or wrong about their thinking. If I looked at life through their eyes, they seemed right. If I took the Bible’s perspective, they seemed wrong. I could only prove my beliefs to those who already accepted those beliefs.
I didn’t know the rules for thinking. I couldn’t sort out one philosophy from the next or give good reasons why a person should believe one over the other. Even the good evidence I had for my faith was up for grabs. Not everyone accepted it as good evidence.
This left me feeling uneasy. I knew I trusted the Bible because of the work of the Holy Spirit in my life, but was that a good enough reason? Didn’t everyone feel that they had some sort of an inner witness about their beliefs? I wanted something more solid to stand on, something that would give me the wisdom to speak with conviction.
At this point, my journey took a direction that many others are not meant to take. In order to deal with the gifts God had given me, I needed to devote a number of years to studying theology and Christian tradition. God used the issues I have just described to inspire me to become serious about this task.
At its best, tradition is the stored up wisdom of previous generations. A wonderful quote is, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.”[49] I have no interest in traditionalism, but good tradition is a time-tested aid for life. Years of hard experience and careful thought have forged it into subconscious beliefs and actions that tend to bring success. It warns us to think carefully when we may be making foolish mistakes. Though we shouldn’t simply accept it by faith like we would the Scriptures, we shouldn’t regard it lightly either.
I saw that God had placed me in a global church that had examined His word for two-thousand years. I was making my job many times harder by ignoring this. It would be foolish for me to try to recreate the work that sprang from centuries of debate and tested experience when I could learn about it through studying.
I had been exposed to some theology over the years, and I decided to concentrate on the group of people I had come to respect the most in that area, Reformed theologians. I had a good friend, Kevin, who was gifted in this area, and he was always available to answer my questions. I studied systematic theology, hermeneutics, logic, ethics, and apologetics.[50] I also memorized the shorter <page 113>catechism of the Westminster Assembly and taught on it for two years in a meeting in my house. I tried to grasp what God’s people had believed from His word for centuries and to practically apply it to my life.
I got more than I expected. I ended up learning not only about the word of God, but also about philosophy from a Christian perspective.[51] As I studied, I realized how desperately I needed this. I saw the many systems of thought I struggled with and how to sort through the conflicting ideas they presented. My gift for creativity had at last found the training it needed. This cleared a good deal of confusion out of my mind, and life began to make much more intellectual sense.
I will close this chapter with an analogy that I believe will help some who consider theology boring and unimportant. I make my home in the northern part of the United States, where winter temperatures sometimes go down to minus ten degrees Fahrenheit. A few years ago, I found one of the secrets to enjoying my part of the planet, a woodstove. It takes the chill out of the air in my house and makes the whole world feel warmer.
In an attempt to save money and preserve something of my aging manhood, I cut and split my own wood. I usually find a tree that has been blown or cut down, chain saw it into manageable pieces, cart the wood to my yard, and split it. Then, I stack it, let it dry, and finally burn it. The process requires hours of work spread out over months and years.
How is this similar to studying theology? The word of God is like the wood, and the power of the Holy Spirit is like the fire in the woodstove. I can’t burn wood until I have done the work to prepare it. In the same way, I can’t benefit from God’s word unless I properly understand it. I need to find ways to get it into my heart (cut the wood and cart it home), rightly divide it (split it), and store it for future use (stack it).
Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.
Wise people store up knowledge, …
Studying theology is a way of letting God’s people help in this process. I could try to do all of the gathering, splitting, and stacking by myself, but this is a hard and often inefficient way to learn. By carefully considering the wisdom of others, I pick up insights I would have missed on my own.
<page 114> The longest step in the process is called ‘drying.’ After the wood has been stacked, it bakes in the heat of summer for months. It is forgotten as it slowly loses its moisture and becomes ready for the fire. In the same way, the word of God may sit in our hearts for long periods of time before we understand it in a way that transforms us. It appears to do us little good, and we may become discouraged that our hard work doesn’t seem to be bearing fruit.
Don’t be deceived. It is transforming us quietly, making us into people who can handle the power of the Holy Spirit. If our will is to do His will, what we have studied will come alive in His time. We will see how it applies, and it will fuel revival in our lives.
The Friend, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send at my request, will make everything plain to you. He will remind you of all the things I have told you.
(John 14:26, The Message)
I have found that when I am most hopeless about God’s word, it often surprises me. In fact, my hopelessness may be a sign that I am finally coming to the end of myself. The wood is at last becoming dry enough to burn.
The moisture in green wood is like the many thoughts, attitudes, and habits in us that keep the Scriptures from combining with the Holy Spirit’s work in our hearts. We may have misunderstood what we have learned. We may not be repenting. We may be expecting God to do our part or conversely, we may be trying to do His. Sometimes we rely on others too much, sometimes too little.
Through the times when God’s word doesn’t seem alive, He is often fixing these problems. He is exposing our foolishness and preparing us to step out in faith, step back from our own ways, or step up to the plate. Our love of simplicity makes us believe that we have already done all that is necessary. How could a loving God possibly expect us to do more? It isn’t until we are frustrated by believing without seeing that we are driven to our knees to reexamine our hearts. At those times, God often shows us where the moisture of our own ideas has kept His word from catching fire. Our false confidence breaks, and we become ready to live life His way.
For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.
Many of us turn away before we reach this point. We study for a while but decide that we are just taking in boring information. We love simplicity, so we give up before the difficulty of learning gives way to personal revival.
God is trying to get us ready for His fire. If we continue to collect truth, it will prepare us for His work. At the right time, He will bring it back to our memory and set it ablaze, transforming knowledge into living insight.
It is easy to see the Holy Spirit’s work in this last part of this process. It is important to hang on to faith that He is with us in the others – gathering, cutting, splitting, and drying. We may be tempted to consider them to be vain religious activities, which they may sometimes be, but I can say from experience that they often aren’t. God has used them to stir me many times. It isn’t simple, but it works.
<page 115>"The person who knows my commandments and keeps them, that's who loves me. And the person who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and make myself plain to him."
(John 14:21, The Message)
Search Comments
This page has been visited 0002 times.
| << | Contents | >> |
10 per page