cont'd

I've really had a lot brewing lately, and every time I've sat down to write something nothing has gelled. It's as if there are ten thousand things inside, and collectively they are busting at the seams, yet when I attempt to select one of them from the others nothing comes.

I'm feeling that way right now too, but am just going to type stream of consciousness and perhaps get the stinkin' cog out.

I have really been doing a lot of pondering the last few months on pain and knowledge. I wrote recently knowledge is nothing but knowledge. Of itself it stands alone. It has some value, but in the big scheme of things knowledge by itself is very, very tiny. By itself it often causes much, much damage.

But people don't look at knowledge this way.

Knowledge is trumpeted as the end-all. If you have knowledge you put yourself in position to have bigger and better (fill in the blank). Power, prestige, advantage, security, success, the list is quite lengthy.

The same is true among those who claim to know God.

In the last two years I have met many, many people who gurgitate all manner of bible verses and Godspeak in conversation. They have a repository of God-knowledge somehow and somewhere inside of them. And yet this knowledge when expressed has sounded like a sour, shreeking chord that raises all the hairs on the spine.

It is an absolutely awful sound to the ears of a wounded heart, yet the people who are playing the chord are tonedeaf. They think that what they are saying is on the mark and just what the Big Doctor in the sky ordered.

Many think because they are quoting bible verses it is absolutely certain that what they are saying has some type of celestial magic within it that will lead to a lightbulb going off inside the person they are speaking with.

Not so.

God Himself says very clearly this is not the case. Interestingly, He says this is not so right in the middle of the part of the bible scripture-Quoters reference as the reason to always be knowing scripture, learning scripture and quoting verses.

What's interesting is these folks don't pause to consider this is the very thing Jesus wishes to deflate. When He speaks to people who are knowledge hounds, He scathes them for having tons of knowledge and being zero about people's hearts.

And that is one of the chief plagues today. People who claim to know God are on a knowledge binge. Meanwhile, they know nothing and care nothing about people's hearts.

This is central to Jesus' message. In His conversations with the teachers of the Law this comes up over and over again.

As I'm typing this I am thinking of three friends. All of them have/had some nasty heart-bruises in life. All three of them went to church with the hope of having their heart recognized (and hopefully nourished) there.

All three of them instead had their heart further damaged, trampled and bruised.

So, what did all the knowledge inside all of the people in the places they went do? Nothing? No, not nothing. The knowledge did additional heart-stomping damage. And what happened as a result of that? Each of these three friends could not tolerate the additional bludgeoning of an already dilapidated heart, and so they left before their heart was killed.

I applaud each of them. Whether they knew it or not, they had a gauge of their own heart and they knew they needed to protect what was left. (Prov 4:23)

A friend questioned on the recent Knowledge post that perhaps I was denouncing knowledge. I'm not. Knowledge has the potential to be part of heart repair, but it does not do so by itself.

Knowledge alone is just knowledge. Knowledge by itself does nothing to or for the heart.

It has to mesh with something else. And largely it's not.