Christian Education

Equipping the Saints: The Totality of Knowing God Begins Here

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I was called a “religious totalitarian” yesterday by a commenter on the Facebook page of my former pastor.

Anyone want to venture a guess why?

I’ll wait here for a second—

{“Final Jeopardy!” music plays while Dan hums the tune—}

Okay, time’s up.

I’ll preface the answer by saying that people can call me whatever they wish. I’m not zealous for my name but for the name of Jesus. And it’s for His name that I am shaken to the core by the reason why I got labeled a religious totalitarian.

My crime? I had the nerve to suggest that perhaps we need to work harder to teach Christians the Bible.

Yeah, my jaw dropped too.

There’s a growing trend in the Church that on the surface is a wonderful direction. More and more people are saying that when it comes down to it, knowing Jesus is what it’s really all about. If you’ve read my recent post on how to become a Christian, you’ll know that I end it with that same admonition. Eternal life is knowing Jesus.

Which is why I’m troubled by folks who go on and on about knowing Jesus yet have this perverse idea that they can get there by bypassing the Bible. By the word of God...You’ve got to wonder what it is about the Bible that makes them so reticent to want to know it or have it taught. Even more so, you’ve got to wonder what is going on inside them that the mere mention of knowing the Bible throws them into hysterics.

I believe this reticence about knowing the Bible well enough to understand the overarching story, the major themes, and particulars about who Jesus is, why He came, how the Church should act, and how Christians should live is a frightening trend. People who are supposedly the People of the Book seem to not want to have anything to do with the Book itself.

But we can’t tell God how we want to grow. He’s already shown us in the Bible. Just three simple verses encapsulate it:

“Only be strong and very courageous, being careful to do according to all the law that Moses my servant commanded you. Do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left, that you may have good success wherever you go. This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success. Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.”
—Joshua 1:7-9

How can a young man keep his way pure? By guarding it according to your word. With my whole heart I seek you; let me not wander from your commandments! I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you.
—Psalms 119:9-11

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.
—2 Timothy 3:16-17

Many of you know these passages. In fact, if you have ever memorized Scripture according to the Navigator’s Topical Memory System, they are key.

What cannot be escaped in these three is the power of the words of God. Power for courage and strength. Power for the avoidance of sin. Power for doing good works for the Lord.

People don’t give the 2 Timothy passage, as familiar as it is, enough power. Want to serve God? Know the Bible. Even if it’s the lowliest service there is, know the Bible. Did Stephen, who waited on tables in service to his Lord, give that profound testimony during his stoning based on ideas he pulled out of nowhere? No! He knew the Scriptures, and the Holy Spirit set fire to that knowledge even as the stones fell down upon that saint!

If God asks that of a waiter, how can we possibly say that we, who too often consider ourselves above that position, are exempt from knowing the Bible? And if we don’t know the words of God in the Bible, what kind of strength and courage do we expect to summon when the mob comes, rocks in hand, for us?

The fiasco at Lakeland, Florida, that happened last year (anyone still remember the hoopla?) centered around a man who claimed he could take people to the third heaven.

Want to go to the third heaven? I can tell anyone exactly how to get there (and beyond) and I don’t need a circus around me to do it. Start by building a foundation on the word of God. Know it. Live it. Breathe it. Then when we’ve mastered the fundamental core of it, we”ll see we’ve built a ladder to the very bosom of God Himself. And that’s a whole lot higher than any third heaven.

The context in which I got called a religious totalitarian was evangelism. The idea that had been floated was that evangelism is a mindset/paradigm and not a program.

Evangelism is a mindset, to a point, but the reason we have people in the Church who are scared to death to evangelize others is primarily because they don’t know the Bible.

If I claimed to be a nuclear physicist and was subsequently asked, based on the credentials I claimed for myself, to speak at a conference on the topic of string theory, do you think I’d be a little panicked if I knew nothing about that basic topic? Yet that is the case with most Christians. We have no ease in talking about the Faith because the most obvious revelation of that Faith, the Bible, remains a mystery to us.

How much easier would it be for us to talk about being a Christian if we better knew the Book that outlines the entirety of our Faith?

We can’t know God if we don’t know what He has said to us through the Bible.

We can’t know Jesus if we don’t know what the Bible says about Him.

We can’t discern right from wrong if we don’t know the Bible.

We can’t know how to live as a Christian if we don’t know the Bible.

We can’t know how to determine which spirits are truthful and which are liars if we don’t know the Bible.

We can’t know the voice of God if we don’t know the Bible.

We can’t make any progress in the Faith if we don’t know the Bible.

God has graciously given us His words because He has ordained that our growth toward knowing Him comes through those life-giving words He Himself spoke.

If you and I want to know Christ and to come to a place of deeper revelation, we simply can’t skip over the most clear document presented to us on how to begin that journey of knowing. That totality of knowing rests on growing in knowledge of God through the Bible. It’s the springboard for every aspect of growth we Christians may achieve.

So something is seriously wrong when Christians go on and on about their deep relationship with Jesus, yet they have a strange reluctance to embrace disciplined study of Scripture. You simply can’t have one without the other.

Several years ago at the church pastored by the pastor whose Facebook forum started all this, we started Wednesday night classes for adults. I offered to teach a course in the basic truths of the Bible. I had originally called it “Theology 101,” but I was told the word Theology was too loaded, so it was changed to something less high falutin’. Other classes were taught that night, about four or five, so people could choose which to attend.

I covered the basics in my class, like the nature of God, why Jesus is the sole way to salvation, and core doctrinal theology. Though scores of people in the church were new to the Faith, I had only a half dozen in my class. The class that got 95 percent of the many adults who attended Wednesday nights was “How to Move in the Power of the Spirit.”

When the three months of classes were over, I had one student left who had not jumped to the “Power of the Spirit” class. She was very grateful and blessed me mightily. When I confessed to her that I had not seen her around church, she told me she attended a different church, but that a friend from my church had told her about the class.

I learned a great lesson that day. Every Christian wants to jump straight to the third heaven, everyone wants to move in power, everyone wants to be a great saint, but next to none want to lay the actual groundwork that will get them to that place. They’re sitting in “How to Move in the Power of the Spirit” class, yet they don’t even know what God has revealed to us about His Spirit in the Book that He gave us.

In a previous post in this series, I said that you can trace a lack of dying at the cross to the reason that so many Christians burn out, walk away from the Faith, or never achieve great things for the Lord. I have to add ignorance of the Bible to that post mortem also.

If I claim to move in great charismatic gifts, I can erect a tent and people will fill it; but if I say that I know the Bible inside and out, no one’s going to toss Franklins into an offering plate on my behalf and tell me how wonderful I am.

The genuine way of Christ isn’t flashy.  It happens in back rooms devoid of glory and acclaim, at kitchen tables wet with morning tears. It happens in the hearts of people who know there’s no way to cheat on God’s test to get that A+, so they study to show themselves a workman approved, even if that study demands some discipline and commitment.

So here’s to the so-called religious totalitarians who believe you can’t get to heaven on a roller skate. If that’s you, keep on keeping on, because your final reward will be incredible.

Equipping the Saints: The Synergy of Spirit & Word

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It wasn’t the best of mornings when you get down to it.

My wife had an appointment scheduled that put her on edge because it had the potential to determine the course of the rest of her life. Jangly nerves and a tremor in her voice all said, “I really need you to pay attention to me right now.”

My son, watching his summer vacation slipping away, fell into that desperate state of attempting to pack as much living into five days as was humanly possible. Flubber had nothing on the kid. He was bouncing around the house begging for things to do, his sole mission to get me to pay attention to him right now.

Meanwhile, I’d awakened to a malfunctioning Internet connection and a deadline to meet. As the materials had to be emailed, that posed a bit of a dilemma. With my IT background, I normally don’t blanch when tech things go awry. But after some computer finagling, I came to the terrible realization that it was nothing on my end that I could correct; my ISP was down, no matter what the blinking lights on the modem said. It was the kind of situation I needed to deal with right now if I was to make my deadline.

And right at that moment of stark tech realization, kid yelling, wife anxious, the doorbell rang.

“Dad, there’s two people standing at the door,” my son added to his tirade.

I knew in that second exactly who it was.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses.

While that’s enough to start some people hyperventilating, I greatly enjoy talking to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I know their theology very well, know what verses to share with them out of their own (flawed) New World Translation bible, and generally throw a box full of monkey wrenches into the cogs of their apologetics. In short, I know exactly what to say to them. And I do it in a very neighborly and loving way.

Most times, that is.

Normally, I would invite them in, but the hyperactive son and the anxious wife who had to leave for her appointment in a few minutes did not make for the best environment. So I offered to have them sit down on our front porch in our three porch chairs—except two of the three chairs seemed to have gone missing.

So we stood around. Ugh.

I then began to commit a series of errors. Instead of steering the conversation toward the divinity of Jesus (as the JWs believe Jesus is a created being, the archangel Michael), I let myself get dragged to the end of that discussion prematurely, as we somehow jumped right to the Trinity, which requires nearly a full overview of Scripture to present accurately (as the JWs do well at dismantling piecemeal Scriptures on the Trinity, especially when presented standing around on someone’s front porch). When I attempted to go back to the issue of Jesus’ divinity, I asked for the junior JW’s New World Translation and immediately realized I couldn’t read it; the words were too small. This meant going to find either of the two pair of reading glasses I now own—of course, both eluded me. Then, I got the “brilliant” idea while looking for my glasses to pull out my Aland Greek New Testament in case we stumbled into differences between the NWT and the genuine text. Five minutes later, I think, I got back outside, hoping to talk more about the tirpartite nature of man and how it reflects the Trinitarian nature of God, but somehow I spent most of that time thumbing my way through my Greek NT and not enough concentrating on the tripartite explanation. Meanwhile, the truth of Jesus’ divinity was receding into the murky past of the conversation. At this point, my wife informed us that she must leave and the JWs’ car was blocking our driveway. Seeing this as the perfect out, the senior JW said it was obvious they and I were at completely different places and were never going to come to any agreement on anything, so so long, buh-bye.

And with that, there was no joy in Mudville; mighty Casey had struck out.

The postmortem of this moment doesn’t need the team from CSI to enunciate what went wrong. Anyone want to venture the answer?

It wasn’t that I was stressed by the events of the morning.

It wasn’t the time crunch or the blocked driveway.

It wasn’t an inadequate knowledge of the theology of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

And it wasn’t an inadequate knowledge of Christian doctrine.

What made the morning less than stellar was that I left the Holy Spirit out of that golden opportunity.

We’ve been talking for the last few weeks about what it’s going to take to get the American Church educated in the deep truths of the Faith, but what I want to add right now is that all the Bible-learnin’ in the world is pointless without the Holy Spirit to pull it all together and make it scintillate in our spirits.

I know plenty of Christians who can handle the Bible well. I know plenty of Christians who claim to know the voice of the Holy Spirit. But the kind of Christian I rarely meet is the one who puts both together.

Word of God speak by Your Holy SpiritYou have on one side the intellectuals with their systematic theologies who could mount an apologetic that rolls like thunder but are tone deaf when it comes to listening to instructions from the Holy Spirit. On the other side are the charismatics who are always talking about the revelation they’re receiving by the Holy Spirit but who will search for hours if you ask them to locate the Book of Hezekiah in their Bibles.

My problem that August morning was that I didn’t ask the Holy Spirit to take charge of the time and guide me His way. I barged ahead like one of those deaf intellectuals, smug in my learnin’.

If we’re to make a difference in the education of Christians in America, we have got to start bridging the gap between the word of God and the Spirit of God. Because in truth, the only gap that exists in that gapless relationship occurs because of you and me. We’re the problem. The Spirit and the Scriptures are perfect.

And so I ask, what churches out there are teaching people how to listen to the Holy Spirit when it comes to correctly handling the Scriptures?

Because it doesn’t work if we know the Bible but can’t hear the voice of the Spirit tell us how to understand and use it. And it doesn’t work if charismatics go on and on about their spiritual gifts but then don’t give the Spirit of God the fodder of His learned word to work from.

If you are in a church that does a great job teaching the Bible but not listening to the Spirit, then you may be getting only part of the story. And chances are, your use of the Bible in those cases when you really need it are going to fall under the label of “the flesh,” and your effectiveness will be diminished. Likewise, if you are in a charismatic church that teaches how to hear the Holy Spirit, yet the average person can’t string together five verses to show why Jesus is God, then you are not putting it all together, either.

If we are to be effective ministers of the Gospel, we have to rely on the voice of the Spirit to lead us in all situations, especially in how to correctly handle the Bible. And we have got to ensure we know the Bible if we are to give the Holy Spirit living in us the free access to the discipline of our study.

Jesus didn’t drop Biblical knowledge into the heads of the disciples at Pentecost. He made what was already there more clear and more transformational. The Spirit brought to mind the time those men had shared with Jesus and amplified the Savior’s teachings. The Spirit made use of what had already been implanted.

And so it must be with us. It’s not enough to know the Bible or say we have the Spirit living in us. Unless we learn the synergy of the Spirit and the word (and—unlike me—ALWAYS rely on it), we’re going to whiff again and again.

Equipping the Saints: The Simple Genius

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Roaming the Internet in search of genuine Christian expression paints what I believe is an unnatural picture of what constitutes the full expression of the Christian faith. Perhaps it should come as no surprise though, given the technical nature of the Internet and the costs involved to maintain an Internet presence, that the denizens of the Web, especially those who speak most loudly for the Faith, are college graduates.

But when I look over the people who have had the most impact on my life as a Christian, the majority never got beyond a high school education. And it never fails that I continue to learn the most about Jesus from people others might deem “simple.”

From a viewpoint of Christian education, these so-called simple people are often the ones with the most unshakable faith in Jesus. If anything, my experience has been that the people with the most degrees are the ones who flirt most often with doubt and who end up getting distracted by rathole theological discussions that ultimately never go anywhere or accomplish anything.

After a while, you start seeing that the difference between the simple person and the guy with the degree letters piling after his name comes down to whether they genuinely live with the Bible as their primary source of knowledge or some other tome (or set of tomes).

The people I know who never ventured into the ivied corridors of academia tend to have a more humble opinion of their own abilities. Ask the college graduate just who provides his living, and he’s most likely to point to himself. The simple person says, “I have all this because God is good to me, and not because of anything I have done.” Simple people say that whatever God says, that pretty much settles it. The college man says he will need to consult all sources before coming to an opinion. When simple people face disaster, they note that both good and bad come from the hand of the Lord, and are we not to accept both? The college grad wonders what he did wrong or to whom he should assign blame.

Are these generalizations? Sure, but I will argue they are not far off the mark.

I continue to get more from so-called simple people, the ones ignored in a lot of churches because they never went to seminary, didn’t graduate from a prestigious Bible college, can’t talk about Proust or quantum physics or how Wall Street schemes up new derivatives. Do we know what she knows of our Lord?Simple people often work simple jobs also, the kind that don’t get them a cover story on Business Week. Simple people who farm the land or work as greeters at WalMart aren’t the ones that churches push front and center when the photo op comes; they’ll choose the captain of industry with the Harvard M.B.A. And when Christian publishers fight to place another Christian Living bestseller on the top shelf of the local bookstore, they’re not beating down the doors of the old waitress at Denny’s, no matter what 50 years of walking close to the heart of Jesus has taught her. No, they want legitimacy, the kind found in clobbering home runs, or running a megachurch empire, or having once been a cohost on The 700 Club.

Not a day passes when I don’t consider that I have learned the most in my walk with Jesus from people who would otherwise be ignored because they don’t have flashy credentials. And I wonder just as much how it can be that we routinely pass by these repositories of simple faith and hard-won wisdom gained at the feet of Jesus. They languish, not because they have nothing to say, but because we’re ignoring them.

If you take all the Christians blogs out there, including this one, and pile their collected wisdom against the pile comprised by what the simple people know, it would seem like the smallest foothill on the way to K2 and Everest.

I think the greatest loss of wisdom in our churches today is that we’ve pushed out the simple people. We’ve done a lot of that to the elderly too. And when that elderly person is some simple soul, it’s the double whammy.

It’s time to take the microphone away from the 35-year-old Th.D. and give the podium to the stooped old lady in the back pew who never made it past 10th grade. I’ve heard what all the self-appointed church genuises have had to say and it hasn’t gotten us anywhere. Let someone else talk for a change.

You know that I’m not disparaging education, far from it. I’m saying that some education can only be gained in simple faith and through the crucible of time.

When I was in college, a friend once asked me if I had a wish for my education. I told him bluntly that I would trade every single bit of arcana I had picked up in my collegiate travels to know the Bible backwards and forwards.

There are people among us who have done just that. We need to get those people to share what they have learned. Many of those people are the ones who truly live by “give us this day our daily bread,” who actually spend two hours a day in prayer rather than just trying to impress others with all the theological treatises on prayer they’ve read. They know the Lord, not just about Him like so many of the rest of us do.

You can read all the Christian books in the world, but one saint who has lived it all is the more precious library. That’s the person I want to hear from. Don’t you?

Then please, let us step out of the way and encourage them to speak.