Pastor Powell's Column

February 2011

Alternative Education

Not everything we need to know can be taught in a classroom.

Classrooms have their place. We believe in Sunday School classes and other classroom settings to teach God’s Word. This kind of learning lays a strong foundation for understanding God and his Way for our lives.

But God has other things we need to learn, things not learned in a classroom. When we meet God in the pathways of daily life, we learn lessons we can learn no other way. That’s where information in the head can become transformation in the heart. As we live out God’s Truth in daily life, we experience the reality of God working in us. This is where authentic relationship grows. Father-child. Lord-disciple. Potter-clay.

Among God’s most effective classrooms are trial and adversity. We learn the deepest lessons when our hearts have been ripped open. The story of Job in the Bible starts with a scene of peace and prosperity and it closes with even greater prosperity. In between, there’s forty chapters of crushing adversity and senseless loss. When does Job learn the most about God? When does life come into clearest focus?

Not in days of ease.

It’s when Job’s heart is broken and he’s at his wit’s end that he goes the deepest with God. Chapter 9 is the lowest point of his bitterness. Yet it’s also the first ray of light. He longs for a Mediator between him and God. Where did that come from? Then very gradually the music of a new theme is heard behind the din of agony and grief. Mediator in chapter 9, Intercessor in 16, Redeemer in 19. And all this twenty centuries before Jesus Christ! Yet God is teaching mysteries to His servant Job, one who won’t let go of God in times of deepest suffering.

Now we live twenty centuries after God’s self-revelation in Christ. Lately we have been reflecting on Job’s journey and on our own, each Sunday morning, so that we can better understand the Mediator:

For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all men—the testimony given in its proper time.
1 Timothy 2:5-6

The series of Sunday morning Bible messages is “Job and Jesus.” Together we discover the foundations God has given us for living and learning authentically every day.

Pastor Charles Stanley has said something to the effect “None of the really important lessons of my life have been learned in days of prosperity, but only in days of adversity.”

God has much to teach us.

Are we learning?