Knowledge puffs up, love builds up.
It was pointed out to me recently that one of my biggest problems is that I am an “ametuer theologian”. This is a problem because I don’t really know enough to explain something fully to someone, I just know how to parrot revelations that I have heard to people and “bottle them” as if they were my thoughts. Now, I know that I’m smart. I know that I can get revelation from the Lord myself – some evidence of that is on this very blog. But I have learned to rely more on being able to repeat things that I hear than get new stuff for myself.
Because of my time spent at IHOP, I thought I knew the end-times pretty well – I taught it 2 summers in a row for goodness sake. But then I got confronted about about it and realized that I couldn’t actually tell you where most of the things that I “knew” were in the Bible. I didn’t get it for myself from the Word, I heard it and trusted someone else’s study-life in the Lord. And then a doozy of an email was sent out by Mike Bickle in which he said “neither the IHOP leadership nor I are mature enough in our understanding to entertain debates and casual arguments that will arise…” There are other things that Mike said, but essentially he said that a lot of the end-times “debating” that I relied upon as the basis for my beliefs are “empty” and do not prepare us for whatever is going to happen.
Understand me, I am not down on IHOP. I appreciate what they bring to the Body. What I am saying is that when I read Mike’s dream, I felt my internal turmoil subside. The same person that confronted me on all of this told me that I don’t need another alternate teaching to regurgitate, I need to encounter the Lord. So I set my compass to get a touch from God.
What I have found since then is that I am enjoying life so much more. I am like a paranoid kid that thinks his Dad is around every corner just waiting to catch him and tickle him. I was at a Bobcats game and got ambushed by the Presence of the Lord. I was at the grocery store and impacted a worker’s life with insight from the Lord into his life. I was able to just sit on my couch and enjoy the Lord, not reading, not praying, just BEING.
Jack Deere has a great saying, he says “I’m already not living as much of the Bible as I know.” Meaning that getting more imformation in my head is not going to help me, applying what I know is a big enough task. This is coming from one of the men in my life that I respect the most and feel like has been transformed into Christ’s likeness, Jack is also probably one of the smartest men I know. Jack told me once when I asked him what the best translation of the Bible was, “the one that says ‘Love your neighbor’.”
The Pharisees didn’t catch what Jesus was throwin’, because they did not have love. We, too, become mostly motivated by the religious spirit when we cease to do things out of love. We cannot give love if we are not first the recipents of love. I can write you a check for $50, but if you do not take it to the bank and make it part of your account, you cannot give it away. Likewise, God can throw love at us, but unless we internalize it, we will not benefit from it, nor will we be able to give it out.
As Alyssa Barlow said the other night “all we need to to wrecked by His love again.”
