Month: September 2017

Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock.  (Mt 7:24)

Father, I ask that your Spirit would take your words and press them into my heart so that I live faith and do your will.  I ask that I would live out your heart in my life.

When I taught, I had to attend a certain number of professional development classes each year. I remember one such class in which a man with a Phd and a nice theory about education was instructing us on how to conduct discipline within our class. The problem was that he did not understand what it was like to teach a real class. He had great book knowledge but no practical experience. Have you ever met someone like that? They know the book, but they don’t know life.

Many people are that way when it comes to the Bible. They are correct but shallow. God does not desire that situation for your soul. He wants His truth to soak deep into the ground of your soul, and that soaking will never happen until you begin to live the Bible. It is not enough to know it. The truth of God must affect where your feet walk, what your hands do, where your money goes, how you use your time, and more. For God’s Word to do those things, it must penetrate our insides.

God is committed to depth in our souls. He requires us to put flesh to our knowledge. The flesh reinforces the learning. Sometimes it spawns it. The man who operates a machine understands the job better than the one who has merely read the manual. The woman who has worked as a nurse for years understands nursing better than the one who has merely read the textbooks. So it is with God. The disciple who has applied the Scripture understands God far better than the one who has merely read it. God is insistent about our taking His truths and living them. Often He addresses many of our questions through life. He wants us to know Himself and His promises through and through, and such knowledge comes more by living than by study.

God does not want us merely to know that He loves us. He wants us to turn to Him when we are down. Then we know His love more deeply. He does not want us merely to know that we ought to tell the truth. He wants us to be truthful when it hurts. Then we understand His command more deeply. He does not want us merely to understand the metaphor of dying to self. He wants us to give up to Him our greatest treasures, to be willing to deny ourselves a mate or the career we always wanted. Then we know the depths of what the metaphor is talking about. He does not want us merely to know He has sacrificed His life for us. He wants us in turn to sacrifice our lives for Him. Then we begin to see more clearly the depths and pains of His sacrifice. He wants us to learn about His forgiving nature by having us forgive. He disciplines us to teach us, removes our security to show us what trust is, gives us pain sometimes to turn us around, puts food on the table to show us His provision, grants us loved ones to train us to love, and sends us difficult people to show us how we look to Him. He desires not merely intellectual understanding but obedience, and obedience requires everyday life. No one knows God who has not applied the Bible to life. Life gives depth and dimension to our knowledge of God. God will not allow us to know Him in theory. We shall have to live Him in life. In doing so, we shall know Him more thoroughly. But this takes time. We cannot know all about God’s love by taking a one-semester course. In truth, someone as advanced in the Lord as Corrie Ten Boom was still learning the depths of God’s love up to the time she died.

To write the same things to you is no trouble to me and is safe for you. (Ph 3:1)

Lord, remind me of the simple truths of the Cross and Atonement, of the Resurrection and my redemption, of your Spirit in my soul, that I may never forget your glorious love, your justice and mercy, and the power of your might. Repeat these things in my soul that I may grow in your sovereign grace day by day.

When we walk with Christ, our knowledge of God grows. This growth is a process so that God gives us more advanced lessons as we obey the simple ones. But this doesn’t mean that we are done with the simple ones. God likes to constantly speak in our souls the simple truths because we need to hear them again and again. It’s like a marriage. A husband may tell his wife that he loves her, but she needs to hear it day after day. The information is not new. But a wife who hasn’t heard in ten years that her husband loves her will begin to forget what he told her so long ago. The repetition is important. It is necessary for refilling the tank, and refilling the tank is part of the process of a healthy marriage. It is also part of the process of walking with God. We need to hear over and over the simple truths of the Cross and the love of Christ, of the Resurrection and our victory over sin and death. The repetition is part of the process of learning about God. The more we hear the simple truths, the deeper they become embedded in us. And knowledge of God deals as much with depth as it does with breadth. No. More so.

For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God.  You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child.  But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.  Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity …  (Hebrews 5:11-6:1)

Lord, grow me in Your grace, that I may know You more.  Let me never stop progressing in the kingdom of God.

I used to teach high school English. One time I gave my first vocabulary test for the year. Most of the students in my class had taken me previously, but a few were new and didn’t know anything about Mr. Demchsak. The students who had taken me before studied and were well prepared for the test, but one new student was shocked. “You mean I have to study the words?”

Steve, who had taken me before, said, “Sorry, Mr. D. I should have warned him about your test. But he’ll know from now on.”

I had a reputation for being a tough teacher, and I discovered that especially my freshmen were different people at the end of the year than they had been on the first day of class. Not all of course, but many of them had learned that they had to work and to take responsibility for what they did. They were beginning to grow into men and women. They now knew something about responsibility that they had not known before. And hopefully they learned some English as well.

The reality is that a man knows more than a 4th grader, and a 4^th grader knows more than a 1^st grader, and a 1^st grader knows more than a 2-year-old, and a 2-year-old knows more than a newborn. We learn as we grow.

It is this way with knowing God. Sometimes much of what we do not know of God we do not know because we are spiritual newborns … or 4^th graders. We could be sixty but a babe in Christ. Sometimes we want our spiritual understanding to match our earthly understanding, but that’s not how the kingdom of God works. Getting to know God is a process of the heart.

If a woman has a genuine heart and faith, she will know God, but her knowledge will not all come tomorrow. God does not dump the whole load on us at once. Many things that we wonder about today we may understand in ten years.

Knowledge of God builds upon itself. No one teaches calculus to a five year old. He would not be ready. In the same way, God reserves His advanced lessons for people who are spiritually ready for them. The process never ends. Sometimes our confusion about God is nothing more than a three year old being confused about physics.

If you want to learn about God, your heart must grow. But sometimes a heart never grows. Stagnant hearts bring stagnant knowledge of God, and a person can stagnate at any stage of maturity. A 70-year-old woman may know less of God than a six-year-old girl because the heart of the six-year-old may be spiritually more mature. Heart maturity and age are not necessarily related. Good hearts will progress. Bad ones won’t.