I’m sure some of you have heard me say this confounding conclusion about education after having spent a lifetime in education. Here it comes: Education has little to do with knowing Christ and having the power of the Holy Spirit in your life. We love our education. The familiar idiom: Education is power. And that saying does, by and large, prove true in our culture. Do you want to be a doctor? Brace yourself for an onslaught of education. But what about knowing God? You don’t have to look far to see some of the majestic saints we reverence to realize that education is not the secret sauce to knowing God. · D.L. Moody had a 5th-grade education. · Billy Sunday was a high school dropout. · Charles Spurgeon attended one year of high school. · Rees Howell dropped out of school at age twelve. · Harriet Tubman was illiterate her entire life. · A.W. Tozer had no formal education past elementary school. · Smith Wigglesworth was illiterate and never attended school. Later in life, his wife taught him to read, and he only read one book for the rest of his life, the Bible. This list could go on and on. I’m sure you get the point. Our religious age confuses information, education, and knowledge with knowing. The difference is astronomical. The difference is knowing about God or knowing God. There is knowledge, and there is knowing. When people are full of knowledge about God, they can be very dangerous. More and more knowledge puts the recipient in treacherous territory; 1 Corinthians 8:1 says, “Knowledge puffs up.” Paul probably had more knowledge about God than 99 percent of the Jews of his time, and he was a very dangerous man. He went on to say at a later time, “And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” (Eph. 3:17b–19) There is a journey we must all make, from knowledge to knowing. If we continually pump ourselves full of more knowledge without the time to wait on the Lord to allow it to do its work in our lives, we can become spiritually bloated and constipated. The journey from knowledge to knowing makes all the difference in the world. The secret to progress from knowledge to knowing comes in the prayer just prior to the one above: “I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith” (Eph. 3:16–17a). There is only one secret sauce; it is the Holy Spirit. timcameronprayer.com |