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Lifelong Students

  I always like to joke with students in youth group (or any adults I end up talking to about my college career) that I should be in 27th grade. It’s a somewhat convoluted story, but I spent the usual 12 years in primary and secondary school but then spent nine years at five different undergraduate schools in two states as well as six years at seminary in yet another state. That’s 26 years of school! So if I go back to school for more education, which I will probably do, I should be in 27th grade! I’m somewhat of a lifelong student.

  Aren’t we all, though? Aren’t we all lifelong students? Whether we enjoy it or not, throughout our lives we learn new patterns of life, new people, new technologies, and so much more. God has given us brains and minds that can absorb and process incredible quantities of information and recall what we have experienced and learned along the way so that we can share it with others. He has built us to be lifelong students even if formal schooling ends for us after eighth grade, twelfth grade, or a master’s degree.

  Will you be surprised as you’re reading this when I say that the person I love learning about the most is God? (I’m not just saying that because I’m a pastor. If anything, it’s probably the other way around.) I love learning in the hard sciences about the vastness and diversity of everything God has created around us. I love learning about the intricate structure and incredible order of things that God established like we see in the hard sciences but also in things like music and mathematics. I love seeing how God has created us to be able to communicate with each other, relate with each other, learn from each other, love each other, and even sacrifice for each other in the soft sciences.

  No matter how young or old you are, as a student of this world, I’m confident that you have experienced the simple fact that there is pain, sadness, failure, and brokenness all around us. Everything eventually fails, no matter how well built it is. Every human body eventually fails, no matter how hard we try to delay that. God has taught us that all of this is because of our rebellion against him. We broke creation when we decided we knew better than God.

  God has also taught us, though, that Jesus Christ is his true son, that Jesus truly is God, that he died for us to pay for the consequence of our rebellion and our sin, and that there is eternal life with God without death or brokenness of any kind for those who trust him. Jesus death and resurrection from the dead is the proof and fulfillment of God’s love for us.

  My diplomas and degrees won’t last forever, but God’s love never ends! Let’s be lifelong students of God’s word and his love found in Jesus Christ!

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