a long time comin'

hello again...(assuming you read the last post)

i want to revisit the topics involved in the posts "missing the forest for the trees" and also "a defense"..i have had several comments and questions and a few days, thanks to moving and being without the internet, to consider them. i am really praying God will help me to clearly communicate my heart..sometimes words are not the best vehicles of communication, but hey, that's what we have...

i think for me the issue breaks down into basically a couple of smaller issues:
1) priorities of Christians
2.) knowledge vs experience
3.) temporal vs eternal

the main question for me becomes this: as Christians how are we to spend our time? how should we prioritize our 24 hrs? and really what should be the goal of our lives?

i see this pattern in the church and really, just in humanity...we go from one extreme to the next, polar-opposite extreme..like a pendulum on an old grandfather clock...the church certainly has been 'flaky'..a group of feel-good people with trite sayings and bumper-sticker-logic with no real idea of how to be a valid part of the world in which we live, embracing the pain and joys of humanity and also no idea of how to live for the kingdom of God. this is a problem. the thing is, i see the reaction to this flaky movement as just as inaccessible, dangerous, and ultimately unwise. i see a rising up of church-going believers rebelling so forcefully against the shallowness they ahve seen that they have become little more than intellectuals like the Pharisees of Jesus' day. and honestly, i am not sure one is better than the other...both fail to answer the questions and desires of my life personally...both views fail to engage the core issues and answer the pounding questions of life and eternity....

nick commented and said experience and knowledge should never be separated- bingo! he said it better than i.

in the Bible is it most uncommon to see the quest for knowledge alone affirmed. all through proverbs, the writr says things like "and WITH your knowledge, get understanding"...knowledge is paired most often with wisdom, discernment, and understanding...we are told the start of wisdom is fearing God..so to me, if someone gains knowledge to the point of feeling certain they are right- if they don't end statements thinking and perhaps saying "but only the Lord knows"-i feel that shows and lack of fearing the Lord, a lack of wisdom, and reveals the dangerous side of obtaining knowledge alone: "knowledge puffs up"...discernment means to weight things out and understanding is speaks to applying knowledge correctly to life...without these essential counterparts to knowledge it is harmful.

a few other thoughts on knowledge:
-the Bible says in Corinthians that love will remain, but knowledge like the gift of prophecy will pass away..leaves me wondering if we should be spending more time on love and less on things that have no relevance to the world beyond us?
-chris pointed out that paul was knowledgable because he came from tarsus and not just because the Lord enabled him. absolutely. i can agree with that. but i would say this: his knowledge was only valuable to him and everyone else AFTER his experience with the Lord...before that it was the very thing that pitted him against the Lord. also, Jesus called the disciples, who were by all accounts, not very knowledgable...in fact, in the book of Acts the leaders of the Jews took note of the disciples because they were "unschooled, ordinary men"...but they "had BEEN WITH JESUS"..so it seems to me experience, and not knowledge, is the common thread binding the followers of Jesus...

now, i am not saying knowledge is unimportant. please hear that. i myself am an avid reader and studier and own greek/hebrew lexicons and see the (needed) value of study..its important to be both "wise as serpants and innocent as doves" we must be informed....through knowledge AND experience...one without the other is useless. we must be informed from the Scriptures as well as from life and nature and other people and most importantly, from God's voice and moving in our own lives. having all experienec and no knowledge makes for a shallow person as James says one "tossed by the waves", but to be a person full of knowledge who has forgotten to love his neighbor is no better than the Pharisees who Jesus openly criticized for remembering to tithe from their herb garden while forgetting the "weightier" issues of the kingdom,such as justice and mercy.

in fact, i would be as bold to say that if our knowledge doesn't compell us to love our neighbor, to serve the poor, and humbly bow before a God who cannot and will not fit into our ideas of him- well, such knowledge can only serve one purpose:"vanity or as the Bible calls it "the pride of life"

the church has been pushing out experience and running for knowledge...afraid to repeat the shallow beliefs of the last years, but forgetting that the two things are married! Jesus came literally to be the experience of God..why else would he have come? because he knew we needed, as the writer of Colossains communicated, "the image of the invisible God" if knowledge about God- and study of Him- could stand on its own- why would Jesus have submitted to coming in the form of a man? experience is a key part of the Christian experience...we should be taking long walks in creation enjoying the majesty of our Creator as often as we are reading about it in Job! knowledge grounds us and has the potential to awe us mentally, but it is experience that enraptures our soul and draws us into love. you could all read my husbands life story from the website (study of him) and know lots of things..maybe you could admire his courage and what he's been through, but you could never know (experience of him) him or love him as i do. did you know that the word most oft used in the Bible for knowledge, actually implies a intimate, sexual knowledge? - experience- valid. that's my point. people were and still are changed by the experience of God...i know too many knowledgable, lost people to believe knowledge alone has the same affect...(not that it means it doesn't have its own valid role in the life of the believer)

[[one side note, a completely personal thing that lots of people disagree with me about and its okay: i don't like commentaries. do i tihnk they are bad? no. i just personally don't like them. i don't think the Bible needs a 'companion guide' like my Shakespeare plays do. i tihnk if God had wanted to write a textbook, He would have. But curiously He left us a book of history, poetry, and stories of His people and His own life on earth. i wish people would publish books of their life journeys to God...failures and victories, weaknesses and strengths, pains and joys...those are the kind of books i would lap greedily up, the kind that would be helpful to me in my journey, the kind, to me, that seem most compatible with the form of the Bible (by the way, Britt, you should write that poetry book...we need it!)]]

the other issue for me, is this blasted problem of being finite, living in finite-ness, and all the while longing for the infinite. it really bothers me (perhaps this for me becomes a sin because it irritates me so) to hear people talk with absolute certainty about spiritual matters. this is really hard to explain, so please bear with me. mark (hello by the way, i like your blog- sweet poem) mentioned in my criticism of logic, i used logic to explain my viewpoint. Precisely. my arugement is simply that no human in his or her finite thinking can even say his or her name without using logic. my point is that logic is based on principles of this world..ones that may not be relevant or even exist in eternity...and that it is still the best tool of understanding and explaining that we have. i am just simply saying that it bothers me when someone decides definitvely that they are correct in their understanding and that everyone else is wrong because i tihnk its arrogant,. i think it would be much more appropraite to say "here's what i have come to, but only the Lord knows"...that i can respect. that seems to me like someone who is honestly studying and engaging in life and 'participating in the divine nature' of God..someone whose thoughts i would trust...the people i have a problem with are those who have spent so much time studying that they have forgotten they are but clay! let me give an example:

i can say, with great certainty, that God is love. the Bible says so directly and i believe the Bible, so its true. beyond a doubt. the only thing is that what 'love' means in eternity i cannot say with certainty. i have seen shadows of it here and i experience it in a human sense, but my limited understanding can only hold a candle to illuminate a small part of the length and breadth of that word from the view of infiniteness. does that make sense?

one of my all-time favorite books is by aw tozer called "knowledge of the Holy" in one chapter he explores the thought that God is unity...completely unified within Himself. he says in essence that God is so completely unified that things we understand as being separate are actually one...such as God's wrath and His love...we understand those two characteristics as distinct, but perhaps they are not? Being finite is to blame for our not being able to grasp that...we learn by breaking things down and classifying, separating, and grouping. as a kid you learned your colors all went to together as a group and that you could separate and understand them by realizing red things fall into one category and blue into another. to understand the concept of color, it was necessary for you to learn to distinguish all colors from each other. otherwise you never could have learned them,...we learn by this procedure because we are not forever and our minds cannot grasp what is larger than our experience...(which is my argument for the necessity of experience..and why new parents are often heard saying that NOW they have a better pciture of God's love for them as His child. their experience has broadened their understanding in a way that the studying parenthood never could have) still if God is one and if we can hardly get our hands on that...well...i just tihnk a healthy fear of God and a humbly admission that our best estimations and guesses and are just that...like someone trying to decipher the pattern of a tapestry by mapping out the tangled threads of the underside...i think that outlook would serve us and the world much better...

so whew! remember that first question..how should i spend my time as aChristian in the world? what should my goal be? here are the answers i ahve come to (i would love to hear your journeys and thoughts too!)
-i must engage in my culture and with my neighbors and spend time enjoying God's creation as well as talking with him, LISTENING, and reading His breath on paper..what we call the Bible...
-and- for all these complex (ha) thoughts and long ramblings, it still boils down to this: i must learn to " love the Lord my God with all my heart, with all my soul, with all my mind, and with all my strength and to love my neighbor as myself".

thanks for sharing in this journey with me,
kate