Dear Reader,
Let us have some fun while discussing important things.
Jack
I can tell you from experience—
And I’ll just pause right here to let you know in advance (for those who’d rather have a heads-up about this sort of thing) that I’m pausing right here to launch into a little demonstration that I hope will set the stage for the point I’ll make eventually in this ever-lengthening short article—which I hope you will opine at length to be brilliant—the point, that is, and not the article itself—although writing a brilliant article is always a nice accomplishment if you can manage it, I believe—
Anyway, I can tell you from experience that when you’re out on a nature walk in the unpaved, weedy wilds, and you’re concerned about snakes, you end up missing a lot of the nature you’d like to be seeing. (And perhaps you can already sense at this point, clever reader, that this is indeed going somewhere in a philosophical sort of way.) But first things, as they say, should come first. So let me get back to the snakes, even if they don’t really say it exactly that way.
As it happens—and let us all pause right now to thank God for this—most of the snakes that worry us deeply here in the good ol’ US of A tend to be relatively slow-traveling creatures of under 100 feet in length, and are found primarily on the ground, where such encounters are much more manageable than they might be if the snakes were typically dropping from trees, or flying in the air, or hiding, perhaps, in our unmade beds (which possibility the undisciplined reader can ponder to his or her satisfaction this evening, as I don’t really have the time or space to spell it out for you properly here). And I should add that some startled outdoorspeople, who had not been as good at keeping watch as they had assumed they were, have, on occasion, stooped to the probably-false—or mostly-false—accusation that snakes have spawned spontaneously into close-quarters—even into trailside spaces previously scanned and approved of by the nervous-eyed hiker. Let me put your mind at east that such spawnings are a complete impossibility, and that only a small number of deaths have been reported as the result of such. And with that, we can get back underway to my point in all this.
Experience hath shewn, then, that when you’re worried about snakes, you tend to keep your gaze diligently low—at the trail shortly ahead of you—and to each side a few feet, to a distance one supposes to be sufficiently out of the range of snake strikes at least, if not out of range of heart attacks as well. And this low gaze, naturally, is an impediment to the surveying of whatever else you might have really wished to see on your outing, such as flowers or birds or deer or dragons and whatnot.
And let us suppose, dear friends, that most disappointing scenario in which you had been on the trail in hopes of seeing it all, and not being content with seeing in part! Well, in that case, snakes and rumors of snakes would end up robbing you of the joy you might have supposed such an outing would bring.
And the keen reader, no doubt, is already suspecting that we are now nearing the point of all this. But alas and alack! I must warn those of you who have not already figured it out, that this article is not really going to end up being about snakes after all—at least, not so far as I have planned as of this, the seventh paragraph. Nay! I tell thee—it’s going to be about Bible Study. So you should brace yourself for the transition, which is at the very door—if you’re not too distracted from counting the paragraphs—or from looking for snakes (if you should still happen to be doing that).
THE TRANSITION
(Subtly executed while artfully maintaining the whimsical tone.)
The Bible’s a big book with lots of stuff in it to see. It’s got plants and animals and people and God and angels and floods and other miracles and food. It even has kissing and fishing—and all kinds of other stuff I don’t have the time to list for you right now.
But iffen you’re obsessed with ___________ —
OK, wait—I should have told you up front that there would be a fill-in-the-blank exercise here in the middle of this article, because some people don’t like that do-it-yourself stuff, and would rather have it done for them. So I apologize, and as a consolation, I offer this hint for filling in the blank:
This is the part where it becomes exceedingly obvious that the whole snake business before the subtle transition in this article wasn’t really about snakes after all, but was about mental distractions. Squirrel! So really, you could fill in the blank here with anything you might like—but if you’re thinking “snakes” you’ll do just fine).
So, back to the colloquially-made point that was under way—because everybody knows that points are better received when coming from cowboys from 1960s westerns:
When you’re studyin’ the Bible, iffen you’re obsessed with ___________, you can miss a whole buncha stuff in thar.
For the sake of example, then, let us suppose a scenario in which Church C were unhealthily obsessed with, say, evangelism, and to the exclusion of other important things. Members of that church, upon studying the Bible, might find themselves primarily interested only in understanding how the texts they read can be related to evangelism, which might cause them to miss the authors’ points, wherever such points were not relevant to evangelism (if one can accept that such a non-evangelistic point might exist in the Bible).
Indeed, such an obsessed reader—or fellowship of readers, for that matter—might well perceive some particular message to be about evangelism, where the writers had intended a message of evangelism-plus-something-else——or, for the mathematically-inclined reader:
evangelism + ___________
(And you can fill in the blank with “snakes” here if you like, but it doesn’t have to be “snakes”).
So if you can accept this gateway idea that a message might not only be about evangelism, but something else as well, then due diligence would have me press it even further to mention the possibility—however outlandish it may seem at first blush—that a Bible author’s message, from time to time, and on rare occasions, might not have been intended to be about evangelism at all, but about ____________. And yes, you can fill in the blank again with “snakes” if you must, or anything else—though I should probably state at this point that if you fill it in with “evangelism”, you’re killing two birds with one stone, so to speak—both missing my point and making my point for me at the same time! (Let the reader understand!)
But I should make it abundantly clear that the obsession does not have to be about evangelism; it could be about anything else, such as evangelism, or grace, even—or snakes, of course, though I think we have established that one possibility quite well already.
In an obsession with grace, for example, some have missed obedience and accountability. And in an obsession with kindness, some have missed sternness and conviction and soteriology. Meanwhile, some obsessed with ecclesiology have missed eschatology—and with eschatology, angelology. And on and on it goes until you’re probably not even thinking about snakes anymore. And who needs them?, because as I’ve already told you, the distracting obsession doesn’t have to be about snakes; it can be about evangelism—or if you must pick some other obsession than evangelism, you can always decide to be obsessed about being “fruitful”, or about being “imagers” or “representatives” or “ambassadors”, in which cases you’re still obsessed with evangelism—provided you’re as good at this game as many have become.
And at this point, you may think I’m obsessed with people’s obsession with evangelism—though in actuality, I have picked that subject simply as one of many possible and good examples with which to play humorously for the sake of getting across a rather important general point about Bible study. But while we’re on the topic of evangelism, I’ll not miss the opportunity to state that I think it is more important for a Christian to learn godliness, which may well include evangelism, than to go straight after evangelism itself, which can be done while skipping the rest of godliness. A godly person cannot be vain, but one can certainly be vain when going after evangelism alone, as some do. And many churches have made evangelism the lion’s share of their focus, such that they are otherwise empty people, even when the pews are full.
If God had simply wanted to have a bunch of people around, no matter their sort, he’d have had no need to divorce the nations for their ungodliness, and to pick out just one nation for himself. And he’d have had no need to divorce Israel later for its ungodliness, and to preserve a remnant for himself. He’d have no need for that “narrow gate”, and would have preferred the “wide gate” instead. And even so, so many churches seem to miss all this, and end up pitching a “wide tent”, recruiting into their fellowship even people of the sort that God does not accept. And they miss this fact that they have done all this, I believe, on account of having an obsession with snakes while out on a nature walk. (I have shifted back into metaphor—into analogy here, for as I had told you before, I’m not really talking about snakes and nature walks. And if you figured this out already, you can sit with the cool kids!)
And I observe that one can have this obsession with evangelism from any of a number of motives, whether good or bad. It could come, in no particular order, from a love for his fellow man, or from a sense of duty to God, or from gratitude, or from a fear of being punished for failure in it, or from vainglory in getting to be the evangelizer, or from vainglory in getting to be the one in the camp who has the really deep convictions about evangelism, or from the vainglory of being the one in the camp who is the chief watchdog against vainglory, even. And I’ll leave it to my audience to decide which of these motivations are immoral and which are good. But you can see, I hope, that even a good thing done for bad reasons can be bad—and that even a good thing out of balance can have bad results.
I have watched a great many churches chose this particular activity of evangelism to the neglect of other activities that are arguably even more important than evangelism. Indeed, I have found many rebukes recorded in the later epistles for all manner of moral and doctrinal failures, but I have yet to find one example of anyone—whether an individual or a congregation—being rebuked for a failure to evangelize to God’s satisfaction. And isn’t that something? Doesn’t that tell us something about ourselves, and how our own church cultures may be different from theirs? In many of our own camps, there is constant fussing about evangelistic failure and apathy, as about the fear that the people must overcome if they are to become properly evangelistic—for many are plagued with insecurities that make them dread such an activity.
And I’m going to tell you that what they are lacking are things they might have picked up on that trail had they not been obsessed with evangelism (or with whatever else). As regards the fear, they could have picked up more love, which drives out fear when it is mature. (1 John 4:18) Or another point regarding the needed confidence for evangelism would be to have the diligence necessary to learn well (in advance) the doctrines (2 Timothy 2:15), so as to be well-prepared for evangelism (and other things, too). But even so, not many churches are even seen to be trying to teach the scriptures thoroughly to their members—though many will lean on the members to evangelize.
Evangelism is such a prime example, I think, of getting things off balance in the churches. It can become such an unthinking affair that many will never notice they are off balance, and will keep driving in that direction, doing more and more harm, all in the name of doing good. And to give an example of how mindless it can become, let me display the passage that most will think of first when they think of passages about evangelism. Please take a moment to read this carefully:
Matthew 28:16 Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. 17 And when they saw him they worshiped him, but some doubted. 18 And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
By the emphasis I put in the text above, I have drawn your attention to the same thing that many thousands or millions of preachers do. And it is possible to get you obsessed with this, such that you miss what else may be seen in the very same nature walk through the passage. Because of this bad habit, a great many people feel some obligation to be evangelizing, and be distracted from any opportunity to notice that those who were given this command were also given another command in the very same sentence!
Matthew 28:16 Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. 17 And when they saw him they worshiped him, but some doubted. 18 And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
They who were commanded to evangelize were also commanded here to teach people to observe all the rest of the stuff Jesus had been teaching them to teach. And if you follow their apostolic careers afterward, you’ll see that they were saying and writing to the people all manner of things about acquiring character and virtue and knowledge and wisdom, and about holding firmly to what they were being handed down by the apostles. But is this kind of teaching as common in the churches as is the practice of evangelism? Sadly, not. Instead, most churches suffer substantially from the sort of attentional bias I’m addressing here.
And look what a huge thing the distracted hiker can miss! The idea of training people thoroughly, in all the teachings of Jesus—that’s a huge idea! And there’s a huge difference between a church that’s doing that, and one that’s not. Very few churches are even trying to do this, and of those that are, many are not doing it very successfully (for various reasons). And this is a teaching that can easily be spotted on and collected from that very same trail, within just a few inches of the evangelism that everybody came out to spot on that trail. But since it is not evangelism, the evangelism-obsessed reader simply does not see it. And how ironic this is—in a sad sort of way—because it’s so close to evangelism in this passage that if it had been a snake, it could have bit you.
We should pause for a moment to marvel at how blind we can be, that we should miss something this huge in such close proximity to the very thing we are anxious to see. We can walk right by it, and if it doesn’t strike out and bite us, or if somebody else doesn’t make us take notice, we won’t ever know it was there—not as far as it depends on us to see it and notice it ourselves. We can pride ourselves that we are on the trail at all. And further, we can be proud that we’re looking for something important while we go—like evangelism. But if we have an obligation to the one important thing, do we not also have an obligation also to all the other important things? Consider what Jesus said once to the Pharisees, while fussing at them about focusing on some matters of the Law of Moses, while neglecting others.
Matthew 23:23 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former.
Should they not have had the whole law in their minds as important? should they really have been thinking that it was OK to focus on the parts they liked, and to ignore the rest?
Suppose that on our trail, dear walker, we were as convinced of the importance of spotting alligators as we were of the importance of spotting snakes. And suppose also that there were rumors of lions and tigers and bears on the trail. And to make it more promising, let us also suppose that there were rumors of bags of money having been found inexplicably from time to time alongside that trail—and yes, chocolates, too! If it were important to us to spot all these things, and not just whatever snakes were to be found, our trail-walking experience would be quite different than it had been when snakes were the only real concern we had. Having all these various concerns beyond the snakes alone would slow us down tremendously. We could so easily miss any of these things when concerned about all of these things—even as a snake-interest-only hiker will occasionally miss a snake that’s lying immediately beside the trail.
And this should really give us pause as we come to grips with the great amount of important information that lies before us. It is simply not as simple as the simple-minded among us would like it to be.
And by way of practical example, let me point out some other items that many walk right by in the passage we’ve been considering:
Matthew 28:16 Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. 17 And when they saw him they worshiped him, but some doubted. 18 And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
Jesus was talking to his apostles about things he had already been discussing with them over the time they had been together. And he was commissioning them for this task of evangelism, and promising that he was going to remain with them until the end of that age (in some apparently-substantial sense that he did not explain here). So many miss all this, counting this passage as a general commission for all believers for all time, for as long as the Earth shall remain. But this is the source text of all source texts, and right here, we can see for ourselves that he was not originally addressing all believes for all time, but only the 11 remaining apostles (Judas having already killed himself).
And suddenly, we are faced with new considerations that are definitely not right here on the trail, but at least a few steps off. We may find ourselves really wanting this commission to be about us, and not about the apostles alone. And so we find ourselves in the messy business of deciding how we will navigate the whole thing. Will we just assume that it doesn’t matter who the original audience was, and that this commission applies to all believers equally? Or shall we opt for a higher level of diligence than that, and go off in search of where the apostles surely passed this command along to all the other believers, so that we can show it responsibly from the texts? How shall we handle it? How, indeed!
I opted twenty years ago for the latter. I searched the scriptures quite diligently to find where they had all been commanded to evangelize. I could find no such passage. I couldn’t even find a passage that might seem to be hinting at such a command having been passed along. And as I have already mentioned, I couldn’t even find a passage rebuking anybody for any failure to evangelize. And this is very surprising to many, indeed! And not only that, but my inability to find any such passage wasn’t merely the result of a brief personal search; I had been 17 years a member of a church that put evangelism quite high on their list of priorities. And it was the kind of church to exert itself to make a case for such things from the scriptures. We were heavily evangelistic, and were constantly leaning on the members to be more and more. And if there were such a verse in rebuke for such failure, we’d certainly have found it and used it again and again.
Only after I left that denomination and got increasingly away from its influence was I able to look more objectively at the matter. And then, at length, I was able to admit that I had been wrong myself about these things, and that my priorities had been out of order. We had focused so much on evangelism and “The Great Commission” that we weren’t keeping up with things that are even more important, such as godliness and wisdom. There was a fairly obvious outcropping of this trend to be seen in what sorts of people were appointed into leadership. It was so frequently the young, energetic, Type-A sort, who were known to be gung-ho for not only evangelism, but also for cracking the whip to get others to evangelize, too. And oftentimes, these leaders were short on other crucial points of character and virtue, which were simply not viewed as of equal importance.
The idea had been, it seems, that if only we could get enough new members, all that other stuff would sort itself out somehow. But it did not sort itself out. And ironically, it got so out of balance, with such much strife and even anger over the matter, that it became such a troubled environment that I couldn’t see how it was a good thing to invite anybody new into the fray. And having dared to admit that idea to myself, it was not long until I figured out that if that environment wasn’t healthy for newcomers, that it wasn’t healthy for me, either.
It was out of balance. And it was determined to stay that way. It was willing to cheat and to make-believe its way into keeping evangelism at the top of the priority list, even if they would never actually put it in those words. It might as well have become a pyramid marketing scheme, aimed at nothing more than bringing in revenue by way of new members.
So we left, my wife and I. And we would figure out later that God had never issued such a universal command for evangelism. Apparently, in his great and unassailable wisdom, he had left it to the willingness of the people—ostensibly, in the same spirit in which he had not set rules about what they were to contribute monetarily when they were pitching in to help out during a famine:
2 Corinthians 9:7 Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.
This raises the question of whether God delights in evangelism done reluctantly or under compulsion. We were certainly (myself included) in the business of compelling the members to do it, and the reluctance of many to do it was famously bemoaned week-in and week-out.
Just as there was no command for how much money the believers should give, there was no command for how much evangelizing they should do. Sadly, though, this has not stopped many camps from issuing such commands of their own. And that’s what we had done, without even realizing that we were sinning in doing it. Not only was it out of place, but the attitude of it all was arguably close to idolatry. And the result of it over time was serious dysfunction within the fellowship.
It’s been twenty years since we left that church. And we were not in a hurry to join another. We did consider a few for a time, but mostly, we were busy studying the Bible for ourselves, and to good effect. We wanted to test the ideas for ourselves, without having a church watching over our shoulders, telling us what we should be finding—and not finding—in the texts.
And in time, we would visit a few, and observe many others from afar, whether from conversation with their members or from studying their websites. But what we never found was a church that didn’t bring some particular obsession to the trail, so to speak. We never found one that would let all the matters in that 1,100-page Bible have their full and proper importance. No, they all seemed to be imbalanced at least, if not also just flat-out wrong on some of their doctrinal conclusions.
Each seemed to have a different recipe from the rest—as can be readily observed by anyone who cares to look carefully—but we did find lots of common ingredients among those recipes, even if mixed in different proportions in the different camps. Whether over-focused on this Bible thing, or under-focused on that Bible thing, or focused on doctrines and practices that are not in the Bible at all, but that they had invented themselves or adopted from some other inventor, we found the same sort of troubling imbalance everywhere we looked. We found no place that thought that every page of the Bible is worth getting right.
And no, we did not look everywhere. And I say that because surely, someone will be at the ready to come forward with his own church as a grand counterexample to all this—for this does indeed happen from time to time. So far, however, no such church brought forward has proven to be that counterexample. They have all been typical of all the rest—and the person putting it forward has been in error, inasmuch as they were not the sort to be considering the big picture after all, but were overly focused on just a small number of considerations most important to them—such that they could maintain a glowing estimation of the church even when a survey of all the facts would not be so enthusiastic.
And I didn’t start this article in order to talk about finding a good church. That’s a topic for another day. Rather, I wrote it to discuss a problem I see pretty much every day, as I continue in a great many conversations with believers about all-things-Bible. God has delivered to us an 1,100-page book, and a great many of us are content to find in it only a thing or two that we’re interested in acknowledging. And yes, for some, they seem to be more interested in imagining into it a thing or two that was never there in the original texts. And if not that, certainly, a great many of us have at least got the priorities of things out of order as we focus too much on one part, and not enough on the others.
I walk a trail nearly every day, and often more than once, for my health. With that priority in mind, it’s best to keep up the walking speed, which keeps my heart rate up and also burns more calories and stretches my muscles and joints better, etc. And in the first year of such walking, I walked diligently and to good effect, though it was growing somewhat boring, and I found myself walking reluctantly, compelled by the need to improve my health.
In the second year, determined to keep at it, I decided to entertain myself by learning the various birds, and then the trees and plants. This was (and still is) quite entertaining, but I frequently find myself not walking anymore for speed. Indeed, I frequently stop to observe things, whether up close, or through a monocular that I often carry for that purpose.
And that’s not the only distraction to the exercise, for I had previously determined to make the most of the walking time by listening to audio books and podcasts and such. And I had already noted the frustration of having to deal with the audio files, whether searching for them or getting back to them after checking an incoming message, and so forth. And then there are the days when I just need to think or to pray during my walk time—when exercise and nature and learning and communications all take a back seat on the bus of priorities. And at those times, I find myself walking more slowly, and avoiding the nature trail part of my walk, keeping to those areas that don’t require such diligence in snake scanning. And sometimes, my focus is so intense that even the walking itself becomes a distraction, and I find myself sitting on a rock or a bench.
And as it turns out, there are many reasons to be out there—and many useful things to be done while I’m there. And no two walking days for me are quite the same. The adventure is much more varied than I might have anticipated—and don’t lose me here, because this is going to end up being an analogy, too. All these things that are related to my walks are important. In no particular order, they are: exercise, reflection, prayer, nature, education, communication, entertainment, relaxation, and whatever else I’m just not able to recall at this moment.
If I were to pick one of those things over the others as the priority for my walk time, the experience would bear very little resemblance to the holistic life-improving thing it has become on the whole. I might be able to keep at it still, but it wouldn’t be the same. And I think that something like this happens in various ways with the churches and with people’s Bible study.
I’ve seen people hurt themselves with an obsession with eschatology (“end times” matters), and I’ve seen people hurt themselves with an obsession to stay away from eschatology! I’ve seen people so focused on whatever it is that they think love is that they become mentally dysfunctional in other ways, to the extent that they can’t even correctly identify certain facts anymore, as if facts and love cannot really coexist. I’ve seen people obsessed with running from accountability, and others obsessed with running toward it. I’ve seen some so obsessed with whatever they mean by “grace” that they end up adopting a grace of a different sort than what is taught throughout the Bible, and having become so blinded in the process as not to notice what they are doing.
Obviously, these and others like them are very easy errors to make, for a great many people are making them. And I’d bet that we’ve all made them from time to time—and are probably making some of them right now, at least to some extent. I should tell you at this point that of all the things I think I’ve learned in this life—of all the times where I thought “now I’m really getting somewhere!”—it was when I figured this out in 2011 or 2012:
“I am most likely wrong about many things.”
That’s my big epiphany from 2011 or 2012, from after I started studying cognitive science in hopes of figuring out why so many make Bible errors, and why it’s so hard to get people to correct themselves when they are wrong.
We humans have been given a lot of information, both in this world, and in the Bible, and we can observe—if we’re the observant sort—that this brings with it lots of room for error in how we interpret all that information—or even in the choices we make over whether to interpret this or that part of it at all, or whether we should simply ignore it.
We might wish for a world where there was not so much to be considered or searched for or watched out for, but that’s not the world into which God has set our lives; He has set us into this one. And he has given us this set of scriptures, and not some other. It’s bigger than we might like (though a few of us wish we had even more scripture to mine for the nuggets that are in it!) It’s more complicated than we might wish, being written by people from cultures different from ours and translated from three now-dead languages. And a lot of it makes use of various metaphors and figures of speech and other literary devices at which we are not ourselves experts. And it calls for lots of knowledge and wisdom and reasoning and reflection. Selah. And these may all be things we don’t think we have the time for—or at least, we may tell ourselves, that we don’t have the time for right now.
But we do have the time right now to learn something, even if we can’t learn everything. And so we should learn something. But so should we also recognize that this leaves everything else to be learned, too—and some of that, as far as we know, may be even more important that what we are busy with at present.
So here we are, set on this huge trail, at left to decide for ourselves what is important to notice as we slip along through time. Surely the snakes, and the fear of other harm is worthy of our attention, but we don’t have to think long before we recognize that a different sort of harm might be done if we were to miss everything else but the snakes.
The way I see it, the right-minded believer should be chomping at the bit to learn far more than he or she could ever grasp in a single lifetime. We should be like a kid in a candy shop, anxious to get into whatever we may be able to afford, plus some more!
Here’s a verse that I believe might have a great deal to say to us, if we are willing to listen to it and to contemplate it as it deserves:
Psalm 111:2 Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them.
As you walked through that verse, did you notice that word, studied? And did you notice the word, all? How about the word, delight?
What might God want you to get from all that? How might he want you to put it together and to reason it out? And is he waiting for you to mine out of this verse whatever treasures he has buried into it? Or is he himself going to download the knowledge directly into your mind somehow? (Many will live as if they believe the latter more than the former.)
One of the things I learned in studying cognitive science is that we humans tend to get some pretty goofy ideas in our heads, like these:
- If I were wrong about this, I would know it.
- God wouldn’t let me be wrong about this.
- My preacher wouldn’t be wrong about this.
- God wouldn’t let my preacher be wrong about this.
It doesn’t take much good study, however, to reveal that we’re actually wrong about a lot of things. So it could be that ideas like these actually shield us from developing a mature sense of self-responsibility and mature habits of self-correction. And it may be tempting for us sometimes to pick one thing to be obsessed about, telling ourselves that we’ll be responsible about this and trying to feel good about ourselves, when really, we know, or should know, that God has actually given us a great deal of other material to consider, too, and that it’s going to take some considerable work if we’re going to be good stewards of all of it.
We may even manage to find a way to be entertained by looking for nothing but one thing favorite while on the trail, whether it be for snakes or money bags or evangelism or grace or proper church structure or chocolate. But if we’re paying attention, we’ll readily recognize that many have hurt themselves in this way, as we have also hurt ourselves. And I think that Sirach has some wisdom in regard to this (emphasis added):
Wisdom of Sirach 5:15 Be not ignorant of any thing in a great matter or a small.
Yes, if we were to take that advice to heart, it should likely bring us to our knees as we grasp just how much there is to be learned in this world and in these scriptures. But the way I see it, there are worse places to be than on our knees.
See also, Evangelism has Become the Idol
