Anonymous Asks (349)

“What’s wrong with ‘always learning’?”

Today’s question is about a description of life in the “last days” from Paul’s second letter to Timothy. It reads as follows:

“But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people. For among them are those who creep into households and capture weak women, burdened with sins and led astray by various passions, always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth.”

That’s a long list of unpleasant character qualities and behaviors that were already appearing in the churches of God in Timothy’s time (the instruction to Timothy to “avoid such people” implies some of them were already around), and are increasingly present today.

The Point of Learning

So what’s wrong with always learning? Absolutely nothing. Only a few paragraphs earlier, Paul instructed Timothy to give himself to the study of the word of God in order to handle scripture accurately and demonstrate to all that the Lord was working in his life. You can never be too concerned about learning what God has said. Billy Graham, who spent a lifetime in the service of God, once said he wishes he had studied more and preached less. That’s a remarkable statement, but I believe his priorities were correct. There’s nothing wrong with always learning. When you stop learning, you’re in big trouble.

But that isn’t all Paul wrote, is it? His condemnation of these individuals is not their incessant search for truth but their inability to apprehend it and live it out. He writes that they are “always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth”. It’s the latter part of the sentence that is problematic. Soaking up information without coming to a firm conclusion about it is worthless. It’s worse than worthless, because it trivializes the knowledge you have received.

Sadly, churches are full of such people: so-called Christians who can tell you it’s fundamental to present your body a living sacrifice to God, yet have never done it themselves. So-called Christians who can tell you all about the unequal yoke in Corinthians, and yet indulge one or more in their own lives. So-called Christians who obsess about the esoterica and minutiae of the word of God but ignore plain instructions about how to live. These have acquaintance and even familiarity with truth, but have never truly “arrived at the knowledge” of it.

Worthless Information

How can I say this so confidently? Because the word of God does. James writes that truth you don’t put into practice is “worthless”. So it is, at least to you. It may be priceless to those who do. Again, he writes, “Be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.” A “doer of the word” is a man or woman who has arrived at a knowledge of the truth. He has taken his study of scripture to the place it was always intended to go: into his personal experience, to be applied and lived out daily. Those who will not put the word of God into practice can never have biblical confidence in their own salvation. They will always be “so-called” Christians until the Lord enters his verdict, because neither they nor we have evidence of their faith.

People who will not put truth into practice will always be yanked around by their desires. Their feelings will determine what they choose to do, rather than the commands of God. For such, their acquisition of more information about the Bible is futile because they are defeating the very purpose for which we learn.