When I worked in a school, one of my roles was to identify obstacles to the students learning. It was a joy to help students to not only identify their stumbling blocks but also to give them ideas of how to either use the stumbling block as a means to learning differently, or how to overcome those blocks, so their learning became more accessible.
What I learned was by both identifying and equipping students to deal with specific obstacles it resulted in the students enjoying their learning across their subjects.
I think the same is true for us as we try and grapple with God’s word. There are many obstacles to our learning, some we may not be aware of, which not only limit our understanding of scripture but can have an impact on our ability to read it in the first place.
The greatest obstacle for us all is understanding that every time we consider reading the Bible we’re entering a spiritual war. How many times have you noticed, when you want to read scripture something else gets in the way? It is so much easier to pick up your phone or a magazine rather than spend even ten minutes quietly in God’s word.
For some of us reading fills us with dread, this may be due to bad school experiences, or we just don’t like reading, or it just feels like hard work, and if we’re honest most of us avoid hard work or avoid additional hard work outside of our paid employment.
For others we think we know enough to be able to live out our faith and what we are taught on a Sunday ‘is enough for me’!
These are all relatively easy obstacles to identify and we can put things in place to see beyond them, however the obstacles harder to identify are the ways in which we’re already living out our faith.
For some there will be areas of unbelief where God’s word pushes against some unknown, but heart committed belief that makes God’s word grate, so we’re tempted to reject his word rather than reject our gut feeling.
For others we believe that being in a relationship with Jesus is more important than reading God’s word. Or reading God’s word on my own is more important than the risk of being vulnerable in church. I used to think it was me and Jesus against the world!
For some of us the hardest and most impossible thing we face is that the world is a scary place, and ‘I need to avoid it at all costs’, this obstacle not only limits our own lives but Jesus’ commissioning of us to seek the lost and broken with the transforming power of his word.
These types of faith journeys are harder to identify because we either believe we are right, or we believe we could never change. Both of these belief systems reinforce the sin within rather than place Christ in his rightful place on the throne of our lives.
From my experience the hardest obstacle to learning that seems to be inherent in all of us at one level or another, regardless of educational experiences, is the belief that ‘I should know this’ or ‘I already know this’.
95% of students with access to learning issues, I worked with, thought their role in school was to give the teacher the right answer. However, as learners our job is to ask the right questions, it’s the only way the teacher can know what we need to learn. And 95% of those I worked with who had no obvious access to learning issues thought at the age of 11 they had learned all they needed to learn to read well.
The key to learning well is to discover the joy of learning by asking the right questions. Bringing good questions, questions we actually want the answers to, shows an openness to wanting to learn and when those questions are answered somewhere deep within us, we are satisfied.
Let’s take a step back into childhood and think about the questions little people keep asking. Many of us parents have many a time become exasperated at the endless ‘what and why’ questions, however it seems this is the beginning of the joy of learning that God has ordained so that in time we will not only ask but then seek and knock at his door.
I always thought that by the time I was 40, life would make more sense, and I would feel more in control of the world around me. It was this moment that the Lord Jesus opened my eyes with the truth of who he is rather than who I thought he was. “And he will be called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” (Isaiah 9:6b)
This was the moment I realised that my life was never about knowing stuff about Jesus but coming to know him, and the only way I could do that isn’t to gather as much information as I could but to embrace the joy of learning from him.
Whatever our obstacles to learning, the joy of learning from Christ Jesus is available to us all.
If you would like more help with identifying your obstacles to ‘knowing Jesus and making Jesus known’ email me on angela@livinghisword.life or come along to Question Time on the fourth Sunday of every month after the 11am service between 12:30pm – 1pm where together we seek God’s wisdom through his word to discover the answer to our endless often unspoken questions.