But John intervened: “I’m baptizing you here in the river. The main character in this drama, to whom I’m a mere stagehand, will ignite the kingdom life, a fire, the Holy Spirit within you, changing you from the inside out. He’s going to clean house—make a clean sweep of your lives. He’ll place everything true in its proper place before God; everything false he’ll put out with the trash to be burned.” (Luke 3:16-17 MSG)
I have a confession to make – I’m a life long learner. Shocking I know. I have a desire or perhaps a need to “know” things. This happens in both format (I’m working on my 5th post-secondary degree) and informal settings. A few weeks ago I was in Southern California at a retreat center in the San Bernardino mountains. Curiosity got the better of me and a spent an hour or so learning about the geology of these mountains and the rivers that flow through them. Why? I don’t know, but I just had to do it. Like I said I’m a life long learner.
I now know things about these mountains but I can’t say that it was a transformational experience for me. You see, we can gain a lot of knowledge about a variety of things but we don’t allow ourselves to be transformed by them. This new knowledge rattles around in our head waiting for the opportunity to pop out – a question at work or a game of trivial pursuit. For our new found knowledge to be transformation we need to be intentional about moving the ideas from our head to our heart.
I graduated from seminary in 2001. In my three years of learning I gained a lot of head knowledge but I didn’t take the time to allow it to transform me. My pursuit of God simply became an academic exercise. When I graduated I could exegete a passage of scripture, apply the appropriate hermeneutic rules, and develop a wonderful lesson or sermon based on my findings. I knew what my end-time leanings were and had a pretty good grasp of the key theological principles of the Christian faith. But I didn’t take the time to be transformed. I was only jumping through the academic hurdles that needed to be completed to pass any given class and graduate.
The issue I am exploring is not whether or not life long learning is a wonderful thing, it is. What I want to address if whether or not we allow the things we learn to transform us. Granted not all things we learn will or even needs to transform us but there is a lot we learn that can and should. Spend some time with the verse above thinking about learning and transformation. See what kind of conclusions you draw. I will be back tomorrow to talk about what I have learned about the transformational process in the last dozen years.