By Lael Arrington
Amy shelves her conference binder alongside fifteen others, grateful for the weekend with top-tier Christian scholars and artists. She glances at the other binders and wonders, “Is this just another binder for my collection? Am I becoming a conference junkie? Why keep learning?”
Carl peruses the course requirements for his Master’s in counseling. He loves being a doctor and, nearing sixty, has no plans to change professions. He’s completed the “course or two” to sharpen his relational skills, but rather than feeling he has completed what he set out to do, he feels deeply drawn to more coursework…maybe even the degree…but why? How might this investment in education pay off over the diminishing years of his career and lifetime?
If I could share a cup of coffee with Amy or Carl I would challenge them…Why not keep learning? And investing in learning? Don’t just think about how your investment in education might pay off over the course of your lifetime, but think how it might pay off over the course of eternity. Everything we learn will go with us. (And hopefully we’ll remember it all much better with an imperishable brain.)
God runs a tight economy in his Kingdom. Nothing is ever wasted. Everything builds on everything else. The coursework, reading, sermons and Bible studies we apply ourselves to learn here can equip us for our eternal role in God’s Kingdom, paying eternal dividends. The people we help educate will take their education with them through eternity, blessing countless others.
It is true that “knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” We check our motives to see if we want to simply soak up more and more knowledge for the joy of enlarging ourselves. We make sure that our education is put into the loving service of building up others. But education can also be a path of worship.
“Jesus,” writes Dallas Willard in The Divine Conspiracy (and A Faith and Culture Devotional) “is not just nice, he is brilliant. He is the smartest man who ever lived.…He always has the best information on everything and certainly also on the things that matter most in human life.” As we learn more about him and what he has revealed and created, we become more fully alive. And “we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another [2 Cor 3:18].
As Kelly and I have edited so many contributions about Jesus and how he is revealed in Bible and theology, history, philosophy, science, literature, art and contemporary culture, our wonder for him has grown. And hopefully, our capacities to understand and love what he loves and who he loves has grown as well. The more deeply we learn the more deeply we worship.
We are not learning for a lifetime, we are learning for eternity.