Oct 16 • General discussion
Something God Taught Me About Learning Theology
A little while back I had a desire to go deeper in my understanding of Scripture.
With the constantly shifting sands of culture, I felt a strong pull to gain greater clarity and perspective on many of the issues we’re facing today from a truly biblical perspective.
I’ve always had that desire to varying degrees, but God was doing something new.
At some point as I was thinking and praying about what to do about this pull, I felt the Holy Spirit prod me with the idea- “obey what I’ve already shown you”.
Even though overall I felt like I was living aligned with Scripture, there was one nagging area of my life I was struggling with that I essentially did not want to surrender to Lord. It was not an area that I wanted to willfully disobey, but it was something I was struggling to figure out how to obey.
So I began praying that God would help me.
In this case, I had to realize I could not obey this particular truth from Scripture in my own strength. I needed His help.
And He worked on me.
He always seems to give me the grace to obey His Word when I am truly willing. It brought me great peace and joy when I began to obey even though it was counter to how I felt in my flesh.
Fast forward to last week I was watching something where professing Christians were debating ethical topics.
I was sitting there thinking, “How do these so called Christians have such confusion over what Scripture teaches even though they seem to have a reasonable knowledge of it?”
I was reminded about what the Holy Spirit had prodded me on months earlier and something I’ve been reading in a Christian Ethics book lately:
Our own disobedience can deceive us and limit our ability to understand Scripture properly.
James 1:22 says “Be doers of the Word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves”.
The implication here is that we can know a lot about the Bible and still not truly understand it, not because it's unclear, but because of our own disobedience to it.
That was a revelation to me.
That truth has helped me develop a healthier fear of the Lord in the sense that I always need to be striving to obey Scripture in my quest to learn more of it and to avoid heeding voices who claim to know a lot about Scripture but who’s lives aren’t a reflection of it.
“Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word.”
John 8:43
“But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready, for you are still of the flesh."
1 Corinthians 3:1-3
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Something God Taught Me About Learning Theology
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