A Lifelong Learner

Labor Day has passed and school is back in session.  That is delightful news to some parents and pretty morbid talk for a lot of students.  Our educators and students deserve our prayers for another school year. Compulsory education law in Virginia dictates that a person attends school until age eighteen.  But what about those of us who passed that milestone a long way back down the road?  Do we continue to learn?  Some would say without any hesitation that they have learned far more from life since formal schooling ended than they ever learned in a classroom.  Many of us joke about the education received in the school of hard knocks.  Hopefully we are developing professionally and personally by continuing to absorb all the knowledge we can soak up. All of us should remain on the learning curve throughout life. 

What I am most concerned with here is our continued spiritual education.  Many of God’s saints are no longer God’s students. Peter demanded that we all “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Pet. 3: 18 HCSB).  We will never outgrow God or become too enlightened for His Word. The Apostle Paul warns against pride of knowledge by reminding us, “If anyone thinks he knows anything, he does not know it as he ought to know it” (1 Cor. 8: 2 HCSB).

There are at least three ways we should continue to learn about truths we have already been exposed to.  We should learn these truths more fully.  Can any of us honestly say we have exhausted any truth from the Word of God?  Gregory didn’t think so.  In the sixth century he observed that the Bible is like a river which is shallow enough for a lamb to wade in and yet deep enough for an elephant to swim in.  To change metaphors, Scripture is like a multifaceted diamond and must be turned slowly and deliberately to catch the varied ways light dances on it.  No matter how many times and no matter how many ways we look at a passage we have read countless times before new insights open before us.

We should learn truths more forcefully.  Not only do we need to learn truth more broadly, we also need to learn it more deeply.  We must not simply grasp truth; it must grip us. Our object is not to master truth but for truth to master us.  I don’t want to just study Scripture.  I want Scripture to study me.  I want it to bore to the core of who I am.  Only when it reaches that miraculous, mysterious division between soul and spirit does it reveal “the ideas and thoughts of the heart” (Heb. 4: 12 HCSB).

We should learn truth more faithfully.  Only when I put into practice what I have heard or read can I really claim to have learned it.  It is when truth permeates my person so profoundly that it naturally pours through my pores into practice that I may say I have begun to learn it.   

Are you a lifelong learner?

This post originally appeared in The Daily Press