students of jesus

It turns out the God of Genesis was right after all. Watch out for those humans, he said. They can do anything, and they probably will. God looked down from heaven to the flatlands called Babel and watched us come together to build a tower. We refused to accept the world as we found it. We made bricks instead of gathering stones. We began to build a stairway to heaven of our own design.

When Heaven took notice and scattered us over the face of the earth, we in turn made every corner of the world our workshop. We employed the simplicity of hammers and levers and wheels to construct stone pyramids in the desert, forty stories high. Four thousand years later our craft still stands against the barren wind and the sand.

Then we turned our attention to the sand itself and fashioned it to silicon. From the tiny chips of our own making we declared ourselves the creators of artificial intelligence. We created machines that count with dizzying speed. Our machines add one and zero so fast and so many times we mistake the result for thought itself.

God saw it first. He said nothing we planned to do would be impossible. We were made from the dust of the earth and we have mastered the dust itself. The sum of human knowledge doubles itself like some embryo hurtling toward birth, yet the manchild we have conceived hasn’t developed ears to hear.

Alongside the sound and fury of human effort the creative Spirit has whispered again and again,

“Trust in YHWH with all your heart,

and lean not on your own understanding.”

God’s answer to Babel was to ask one man to trust Him. Heaven’s alternative to our great industry and understanding was a simple relationship.

From macro to micro it’s the same story. Whether we look to the grand stage of human history or examine the hidden platform of our hearts, our choice remains: will we lean on our understanding, or lean into a relationship with him? Human knowledge doubles every 18 months, but trust and relationship are cultivated in the soil of daily life.

The world morphs exponentially before the march of knowledge and effort, but our greatest need is to chant the ancient words until they take root and begin to grow:

“Trust in YHWH with all your heart,

and lean not on your own understanding.”

The way of submission is counter-intuitive, yet what if our intuition is merely another way saying “sin?”

Father, your love is so much greater than my understanding. Please help me to live in your love.

It’s so much easier to study about about Jesus than to be a student of Jesus. We face the constant temptation to fill our heads with the details of his life and ministry. Pastors and college professors emphasize the need to memorize Bible verses or learn Greek and Hebrew. Publishers produce massive volumes of systematic theology. Popular Christian books suggest Biblical keys to success for our finances, healing, or any other human need. But Jesus is not a system, he is a person.

Perhaps we should give ourselves first to filling our hearts and lives with his presence. An omniscient God is not impressed with the size of our intellect, but he is impressed with the size of our heart. How can a finite human mind grasp an infinite God? St. Augustine, one of the greatest intellectuals in history, lamented that the “mansion of his heart” was too small and asked God to graciously enlarge his heart, not his mind. The Holy Spirit, who breathed out every word of the scripture, is not impressed with how many verses we have committed to memory, but he is impressed with how many verses have found their way into our everyday lives. Jesus didn't care much for religious knowledge, but he was astonished by the faith of simple people like widows and gentile soldiers.

Even though the Scripture encourages us, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding,” we are constantly tempted to pursue human understanding regarding the words of Jesus when we should pursue his living presence. Trust is about relationship, understanding is about intellect. In Jesus, God chose to become a man. The infinite stooped down and clothed himself in humanity. In his earthly ministry Jesus did not reveal all the secrets of knowledge and learning in human history. He chose instead to reveal how it was possible to enter into relationship with the creator. Jesus chose to reveal the Kingdom of God. By his actions, Jesus taught relationship is more important than understanding. We know this intuitively. We tend to forget it when it comes to our faith.

Faith does not require us to throw our brains into the trash. It does, however, require us to order our lives around what is most important, and relationship comes first. Jesus opened the way back to relationship with the creator. The good news of the gospel is that the Father has gone after the very children who have rejected him. He refuses to leave us alone. He will pay any price--even the life of son--in order to win us back again. That's a committed relationship in action.

Some of us have busied ourselves with developing human descriptions of God’s action. We discuss words like justification or sanctification. We try to present the legal reasons Christians can expect to go to heaven when they die. When Jesus paid the price for reconciliation, he wasn’t thinking about theology: he demonstrated God’s irrepressible love. Jesus described eternal life in terms of relationship with God: “Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” (John 17:3)

In Jesus are "hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." (Colossians 2:3) We are commanded to love the Lord our God with all our hearts, mind, and strength, so we can confidently apply our intellect in the love of God. We should also remember that the countless of number of people from every tribe, tongue, and nation who will worship him in heaven will certainly include the unlearned and the illiterate--and they may have a thing or two to teach us about a loving relationship with Jesus.

The challenge for us as Students of Jesus, then, is to know him, and not settle for knowing about him.

Poor, sickly Heinrich Heine

• I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; (Ezekiel 36:26)
• “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. (Jeremiah 31:33)
• Wait! There are too many examples to cite. You can trust me on this.

Once there was a boy sitting on a porch, with a dog next to him.  A salesman approached the porch and asked the boy, “Does your dog bite?”

“Nope,” said the boy.

The salesman stepped on the porch to ring the doorbell and the dog viciously bit his leg.  “I thought you said your dog didn’t bite!” screamed the salesman.

“My dog doesn’t bite,” said the boy.  “But that’s not my dog.”

Sometimes asking the right question can make all the difference.

One of the great obstacles in becoming a follower of Jesus is learning to ask the right questions.  The disciples wanted to know who among them was the greatest.  The Pharisees wanted to know by what authority Jesus did his powerful works.  Pontius Pilate wanted to know, “What is truth?” when Truth Himself was standing right there.  It’s clear they all missed the point.  What is not so clear is the fact that we, too, can miss the point.

The questions we bring to Jesus can make a big difference in our journey of transformation.  We live in a religious culture that craves correct answers.  I’m afraid Evangelical Christianity places correct answers above relationship with God.  Now, there’s nothing wrong with correct answers: we won’t get very far believing that two plus two equals twenty-two.  But you can do the math all day long and still not know God.

“There is today no lack of Bible teachers to set forth correctly the principles and doctrines of Christ . . . strangely unaware that there is in their ministry no manifest Presence, nor anything unusual in their personal lives.”  ~ A.W. Tozer

What Tozer wrote in the early 1960’s is even more acute today.  We have come to God with our list of questions, eager to hear the answers we think are important.  We have come to the scriptures with our values and world-views, eager to read into the text those things we think God wants the world to know. We have done this.  The church.  We have insisted that God speak to our values rather than learning what is on his heart.

I believe we have valued knowledge over experience and relationship.  Knowledge is easier to grasp.  We can master a subject.  Yet there is a kind of knowledge that comes only from experience.  It’s the difference between studying the physics of a curve ball and learning to hit one.  In the arena of Christianity, it is easier to relate to a book (the Bible) than it is to experience relationship with the Lord Himself.  Again, I am talking about you and me, the church.  One reason we reduce evangelism to the narrow message of “Jesus died for your sins” is that it does not require relationship with Jesus on the part of the believer or the prospective believer.  The Great Commission--to make disciples--costs everything on the part of the believer and the prospective believer.

Do we really want to know Jesus, or simply know about him?  How long would it take to know him?  Consider these amazing words from the Apostle Paul, who had walked with Jesus for decades when he wrote:

I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ . . . I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.” Philippians 3: 8 & 10 (I omitted verse 9 in order to emphasize Paul’s point.)

Every follower of Jesus should ask this question: if Paul still desired to know Jesus more and more after two decades, how much more is there for me to experience?  Paul was not hungry for doctrine about Jesus.  He wanted Christ himself.

Jesus understood the powerful attraction of religious doctrine when he said, “You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me.”  Sadly, as he spoke to religiously-minded people he concluded, “yet you refuse to come to me to have life.”  (John 5: 39 - 40)  Correct doctrine is important, but it is not the reality.  It is the doorstep, not the door.  The menu, not the meal. It is the skeleton, not the living body.

The first and greatest commandment is to love the Lord.  Love is relational and experiential--and yes, love depends upon the truth as well.  We can take a lesson from our own children: we want them to love and trust us, but we do not require that they understand us in every respect.  They can even repeat our words back to us, but it does not guarantee that they understand what we have said.  In many cases the understanding will come years, even decades, after we are gone.

What questions do we bring to the Lord?  What questions do we bring to the scripture?  The answer waits upon the right questions.