Slow Learner

When I was six years old, my mother signed me up for piano lessons. My sister went on with them and still plays the piano. My brothers learned some piano, then guitar and banjo. I struggled for about a year. My mind would not let my left and right hand do two separate things. Finally, my teacher, my mother, and I all gave up at the same time. Even though I regret my lack of perseverance, the piano was not for me.
 

The past few weeks while reviewing old spiritual journals, I’ve been appalled at my slowness to learn obedience to God. Every old lesson has been repeated and repeated. Things that I have relearned this year were first learned decades ago. Why didn’t they stick? Why did it take so long to get God’s truth into my head and into my life? As I’ve pondered this question, God amazes me with today’s devotional reading. (Yet I’m sure He has told me this more than once also.)

It is eleven days’ journey from Horeb by the way of Mount Seir to Kadesh-barnea. (Deuteronomy 1:2)

One simple verse describes how far it was from where Moses and the people of Israel left Egypt and began their journey to the promised land. As the devotional reading says, it was only eleven days away, yet it took them forty years to get there! 

Why did this journey take more than 1300 times as long as it should have? Because this is the way of humanity and the depth of human sin. Even when we give ourselves to God and to a life of faith, sin in us resists every step of the journey and instead of moving on, we fumble and stumble, even go backwards. 

In the same way, just as it took them far longer than it needed to go that short distance to freedom, so has it taken me far longer than it needed to move from salvation to a set-apart and sanctified life. My sin also has resisted God every step of my journey. I’ve fallen and gone backwards so many times.

The reading says, “How slowly we get over the ground! What windings and turnings! How often we have to go back and travel over the same ground, again and again. We are slow travelers because we are slow learners.”

I think about the way my mind works. I live in the “now” and am easily distracted. That means I do not dwell on the stuff of the past, good or bad, or think much about the future. Worse yet, when I think about anything, my mind doesn’t stay there very long. For example, reaching for my calculator to figure out that 1300 number took me into a shelf that contained a document that grabbed my curiosity. Instead of the calculator, I picked up the document and looked at it for a few minutes. Easily distracted.

Very little meditation and being easily distracted means that lessons barely scratch the surface before I’m off to something else. As today’s reading says, “God is faithful and wise, as well as a gracious and patient teacher. He will not permit us to pass cursorily over our lessons.”

 

Just when I might think I have mastered a lesson because I “got” it, my wise Teacher knows better. He sees the need of deeper plowing. He does not want me to be a mere theorist with a smattering of this or that in my head. Instead, unlike the music teacher, He will not give up. He keeps me year after year playing scales because He wants me finally making music.

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God, as I read the Old Testament account of Your people wandering in the wilderness, I see myself engaged in the same complaining and rebellion. I also see how You wanted to put an end to their resistance before You allowed them to get to the real work of receiving the promised land and conquering their enemies. 

You are doing the same with me. On one hand, I’d like to forget the past and press on, but on the other, it would be prudent to at least remember the lessons. Layer by layer, You keep teaching me. Has anything finally permeated deeper than the surface, deeper than merely “knowing” what kind of person You want me to be and how I should live? Sometimes I don’t think so. I could sit here and rue all my mistakes, weeping and regretful. Or I could remember the lessons, even the repetition of each one, and simply be obedient, allowing You to finish all that You started and keep moving toward a fuller victory.

To Live is Christ — where bad can produce good

"Sir, What is the secret of your success?" a reporter asked a successful business man.
"Two words."
"And, sir, what are they?"
"Good decisions."
"And how do you make good decisions?"
"One word."
"And sir, what is that?"
"Experience."
"And how do you get experience?"
"Two words."
"And, sir, what are they?"
"Bad decisions."

This well known quote about decision making has no name tied to it, but I wonder if that man was a Bible reader. He reflects the same wisdom as the verses I have been reading.

It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes. The law of your mouth is better to me than thousands of gold and silver pieces. (Psalm 119:71–72)

While afflictions are not always from making bad decisions, a bad decision almost always makes me feel afflicted. This Hebrew word carries the idea of looking down or browbeating. It has also been translated as: humbled, forced, exercised, troubled and weakened. Sounds like the results of a bad decision to me.

Other associated words include being occupied, busied with, oppressed, bowed down, put down, become low, depressed, downcast, stooped and humiliated. None of these are pleasant experiences, yet whatever meaning the psalmist had in mind, he valued that some negative things had happened to him because through them, He was sent to Scripture and there he learned positive things.

However, when I was a new Christian, the idea of finding answers to my afflictions from the Bible was overwhelming. Where does a person look? The problems were big, but that book is bigger. I didn’t know where to begin.

Years of reading has helped me. So have other believers with more experience. One of my favorite resources is a little book by the late Selwyn Hughes called Your Personal Encourager. His 40 chapter titles include, “When God seems far away,” “When one thing comes after another,” and “When weighed down by stress.”

Another book, Overcoming Negative Thoughts, by Vera Wurtz, has 32 chapters with similar titles. Like Hughes book, this one also has Scripture that gives answers to perplexing problems and emotional meltdowns that happen during distressful times.

Whether affliction is something that happens to me, or something I bring on myself because of bad decisions, the Lord offers principles from His Word that bless me and teach me. As the psalmist says, His Word is better to me than finding a gold mine or winning a lottery.

Correction before instruction

Does watching crime dramas on television indicate a strong desire for justice, or does that strong desire come from watching crime dramas? Either way, I notice how often the perpetrator of a crime will say they didn’t know they were doing anything wrong, or they didn’t mean to hurt anyone. At the same time, had the authorities not caught and stopped them, they would have continued doing the crime, thoughtlessly or otherwise.

These television plots are fiction, but they illustrate the truth that every person needs discipline. We all do things that hurt and offend and need to be made aware of our thoughtless actions. One teacher in a class on human development said that if a little child is not disciplined by his parents, then correction will be left up to the next authority figures in his life, his teachers. If they do not, or cannot, do it, then it will be up to the police. At some point, God might move in and do it, but God does not correct everyone.

The Bible says that the Lord chastens those He loves, those who belong to His family. While I don’t like it, such correction from God is a good thing. He knows what I need, knows it better than even the most loving parents and caring teachers. In fact, “Blessed is the man whom You discipline, O Lord, the man you teach out of Your law” (Psalm 94:12).

The devotional for today notes that this verse says the Lord puts chastening before teaching. I know from my own experiences that this is reasonable. I do not hear God until He allows something drastic, or at least loud and clear, to get my attention.

One biblical example is the prodigal in the story Jesus told in Luke 15. This young man asked for his inheritance and his father gave it to him. Then he “gathered all together, journeyed to a far country, and there wasted his possessions with prodigal living. But when he had spent all, there arose a severe famine in that land, and he began to be in want. Then he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country, and he sent him into his fields to feed swine. And he would gladly have filled his stomach with the pods that the swine ate, and no one gave him anything.”

Sadly, this man had to be brought to his right mind by hunger, before he thought about his family. He had no heart to return until he experienced a mighty famine, which was God’s way of chastening him.

I’m like that. I will continue doing my own thing in certain areas of my life, not even realizing that I have moved outside of God’s will. I’ve no thought or heart to change until God sends something that makes me feel great need for change. It might be a sense of emptiness, but it can also be a reversal in prosperity, dismal failure, or any number of things that are designed to make me wake up and consider the will of God.

Then I have an ear to listen, and then God is able to teach me about change, and to be fruitful instead of selfish. He instructs me by His Holy Spirit, teaching me lessons for my eternal good out of His principles as recorded in Scripture.

This devotional writer clarifies that where Psalm 94:12 refers to the “law” he is not limited to the Ten Commandments or the Old Testament laws. He says (edited slightly)

The “law” has wide significance. In the original it means ‘instruction’ (using the word ‘Torah’ which signifies “teaching” or “direction”). This includes both Old Testament law and the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ: “the perfect law of liberty” and “the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus.” It is that law which was in the heart of the Redeemer, when He said, “I come to do thy will, O God; yea, thy law is within my heart” (Hebrews 10:7, etc.).

The Lord teaches me “out of the law” as I am able to learn it. Christ said to His disciples in promising the Spirit: “He will teach you all things” (John 14:25), but He cannot take “all” and show it to me all at once; I could not live with that. Instead, He shows “here a little, and there a little” as He chastens and teaches according to His knowledge of me, my need, and my ability to learn and grow. This is the blessedness of His discipline and teaching; it is always in mercy and grace, tailor-made for me and for each child of God.

No truancy

We smile at the commercial in which a child in a highchair mimics his father by saying “antidisestablishmentarianism,” yet no one would teach such complex words to a two-year-old. Further, most adults have no idea what this word means, never mind a child. It is known more for its length than its meaning!

Even adults have to start at the beginning when it comes to learning. Language lessons start with simple words and grammar. Mathematics begins at the basics, not with trigonometry. When I upgrade some of my software, I am glad that I’m working on an upgrade. If I had to start with the latest version, the learning curve would be too steep for me.

When Jesus talked to His disciples, He also realized that they were not ready for the answers to all their questions. Most of them didn’t yet know how little they knew; they were just getting started in their spiritual education. In John 16:12-15, Jesus told them:

I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. However, when He, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth; for He will not speak on His own authority, but whatever He hears He will speak; and He will tell you things to come. He will glorify Me, for He will take of what is Mine and declare it to you. All things that the Father has are Mine. Therefore I said that He will take of Mine and declare it to you.

I’m comforted by this. I know it applies to me too. I know that I don’t know everything and that spiritual understanding ties closely to experiences. Some of the things that I don’t know are related to experiences I’ve not had, even to some experiences that I hope I never have!

Jesus did say that the Spirit would guide His followers into “all truth” though, and if I want to know all, I need to be willing to sit in His classroom. In this place of being teachable, I find only two basic items on the curriculum.

One is that the Holy Spirit teaches me who I am. This course has two subsets: who I am as a helpless sinner who cannot do anything apart from Christ, and who I am as a child of God who is able, through Christ, to do all things.

This basic course begins at salvation and ends when I die. Many of the lessons are difficult, but as long as I am willing to daily wade through the subject matter, and sometimes be overwhelmed by the enormity of what He is showing me, He will teach me all that I need to know.

The second course is “To know the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom he has sent” (John 17:3). The Holy Spirit introduced me and continues to teach me about Jesus and what He has done to atone for my sin, purge my guilty conscience, and help me to be conformed to His image. Daily, if I stay in the classroom, I learn that no matter how low my old nature takes me, the power of my Savior means forgiveness, cleansing and new life. This course takes care of the negatives learned in the first one.

In these lessons I also learn that He supplies all my needs. I need daily care, contentment, the ability to deal with everything that comes at me in life, a biblical sense of self, and a whole host of other things. Truly, Jesus is all that I need. The Holy Spirit teaches me that reality.

Of course I didn’t learn all this on the first day of school. I could not have taken it in, never mind used it in my life. Instead, He wisely guides me as I need it and can bear it, both in the knowledge of my own sinfulness and in the awareness of His great saving power.

Besides all that, what He teaches is valuable and relevant. I may or may not ever need to know the meaning of antidisestablishmentarianism, but what I do need, He teaches, and He teaches it well. All I need to do is make sure that I stay in school.