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I have officially finished three full years of seminary and am right on track to finish school in just one more year. Additionally, today is my 26th birthday.
We didn’t get to do anything too elaborate to celebrate, although I think both are occasions which warrant celebration. However, it is encouraging to see our progress as furthering us towards our goal of serving as missionaries.
With each year that passes, both in school and life, we gain greater knowledge in our vocation, our circumstances, and our surroundings. Yet, I’m continually shocked in how, despite all the striving of man, knowledge fails. Recently, I’ve seen how grown Christian men, educated in the scriptures and seasoned in ministry, have failed one another even with depths of knowledge.
In spite of all their knowledge, these men have failed at something that the smallest child finds easy to recognize. “Wisdom and philosophy never found out God; He makes Himself known to us through our needs; necessity finds Him out.” The babe who lacks training in education and rubrics recognizes its great pinnacle of need, namely its need for love. I like the way Paul put it: “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds us” (1 Corinthians 8:1).
I think that in all our aspirations for ministry and usefulness we must identify that love, not knowledge, should be our aim. “Love takes one beyond himself to aid another; it builds up.” Genuine love includes our personal humility to admit when where wrong, confess when we’ve sinned and wholeheartedly accept our need and dependence. Genuine love will seek to build others up as focus shifts from self to others, our motivation from sufficiency to insufficiency.
I’m amazed at how we all once knew this as children, but have since forgotten.
Sadly, the allure of knowledge’s great ability is deceptive. In my life I’ve seen it produce more division than unity, more arrogance than humility, more distance than fellowship, and more scholars than servants.
“The man who thinks he knows something does not know as he ought to know, but the man who loves God is known by God” (1 Cor. 8:2-3). Hopefully, in beginning my final year of school, the Lord will keep teaching me that the true Gospel is not understood in the mere knowledge of Christ, but rather in needy love for our Savior; that the Gospel is seen not just by our words, but in our actions.