To Encourage You

Jeremiah 33:3 “Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known.”

Are you teachable?  The atheist isn’t.  For anyone to claim that they know there is no God is the ultimate in close-mindedness, for how much can you tell anyone anything who dogmatically claims to know something that they most certainly can’t know?  To be teachable is to understand that there are things that we don’t know. It’s to confess that we don’t have it all figured out. It’s to acknowledge that there are people who know more than we do, no matter how much we think we’ve learned over the years.  And if there are people who know more than us, what about the God Who alone knows everything.  

Think about a man like Paul. Here was one who wrote much of the New Testament.  To delve into his writings is to peer into an incredible mind.  Here is one into whom God poured one truth after another. He longed for those to whom He wrote to understand the things the Lord had taught Him.  Listen to his prayers for the Ephesian church: “I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints” (Ephesians 1:16-18).   And this: “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father,  from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being,  so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love,  may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Ephesian 3:14-19).  Similarly, for the church at Philippi Paul prayed this: “And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God” (Philippians 1:9-11).  And for the Colossian church, “From the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God” (Colossians 1:9-10).  And yet, this man who so desired that others would grow in their knowledge of God, says this of himself: “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith— that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.  Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:8-16). 

As Paul reflects on this glorious God, he has the wisdom to have a teachable spirit. It’s the heart that God would have us to have, as reflected in His words to us above given through the prophet Jeremiah.  He wants us to desire to know Him better all the days of our life, for there are always more “great and hidden things that you have not known.” And so, Paul continues with instruction to those who think they have “arrived”: “Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained” (Philippians 3:15-16).  Paul would have us to know that the life of the believer is a life of ever-increasing knowledge of this infinite God that we serve.  

May God give us the heart of Paul, the heart of Jeremiah, and the heart of the psalmist who prayed these words: “Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law” (Psalm 119:18).  That’s God’s will for us. It’s a prayer of those who are teachable. And it’s a prayer that He Who is the greatest Teacher is most certainly willing to answer.