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Thursday, August 18, 2011

Spiritual Growth does not come from a Vitamin - Jason

We work in the same two villages each day.  In one of the villages, nutrition is a problem.  The kids could really benefit from a vitamin each day.  I think there are a few people who have become interested in supplying those vitamins and we are thankful for that.  It seems to me that it will do a lot of good.  In that village, the educational level of the kids is very bad and I wonder if some of it is just due to lack of health.  In this case, vitamins could make a difference.  Amazing that we can learn and discover what is good (Vitamin A, D, etc.), extract those and then give them to people who are lacking them.

I think sometimes we try to do the same thing though with Spiritual growth.  It becomes the "3 things every married couple should practice," "10 Biblical principles for sound money management," "5 Leadership traits from Biblical figures," etc.  In the field of education, we look for better methods for integration - how can we take the Bible in make it the backbone of the various disciplines.  And...there are methods for doing it.  We are looking for the vitamin - "extract the principles and just give me those."

But, when you stop and think about it, it becomes clear that Biblical truth cannot be handled in this way.  The Bible is not simply knowledge about something.  It is not simply cognitive understanding.  We do not teach the truths in the Bible in order to introduce people to a message.  We teach the Bible in order to introduce people to a person.  The very God of the universe can be met in the pages of Scripture.  And when we walk in relationship with Him, He changes us to become more like Him.  The husband who knows three things he should do and the husband who is becoming more like Christ are two very different husbands.

That is true in any relationship.  Think about a person who had an impact on you - not just in your thinking, but you know that you are different because of this person.  What if you had never met that person, but instead someone had made a list of their character traits or principles from their lives and you had read it?  Is it possible that you could still be impacted?  Sure, it is possible, but much less probable.  It is only possible to the extent that those ideas actually become your ideas, it is impossible if those ideas are simply known by you.

What am I saying?  There is no substitute for knowing God.  As an example, in the field of education, we will have an impact on our students when we are genuinely changed.  We will be genuinely changed as we know Him, not as we implement new methods.  The difference would be that in the former, the students are taking on the life that they see in us because we are genuinely different.  In the latter, we employ methods which the students will at best also implement in their own lives.  The one is changed life the other is changed methods for living.  The one is qualitative change, the other is the same type of change offered by any other religion in the world.  We are not offering a different way to live, we are offering a new life!

To those of you who made it through that, I have not found a good way to explain this concept.  I think it might be because we are so used to learning in lists that it is difficult to envision how exactly this change takes place - we have been trained to look for the vitamin.  If you have a good idea for how to explain it, I'd love to hear it.