Head - What type of knowledge do you want?

Last week, I used the image of building a snowman to help understand discipleship particularly in the family. A well formed snowman has 3 sections. Those sections relate to areas we need to grow as a Christian: Head (Know about God), Heart (Love God), and Feet(Service for God).  Today, I want to talk about what it means to make sure the head of our snowman is well-formed. How do we grow in our knowledge of God?

One of the things we do from time to time as a family is to watch Jeopardy. We like to watch to see how many of the answers we know. We know that we will not be good enough to make it on the show but we want to see what we know. We all have our strong subjects where we might now over half of the answers in that category. Rarely do we know all of them in a column but it does happen. Now, when I do know the answer, quite often, I struggle to explain why that is the right answer or how I know that answer.

We use a term for that: trivia – interesting facts that are not well-known.  Most of the time, they are unknown because they are also trivial – of little worth or importance. Knowing who all the wives of Zeus is not going to impact how I live. Knowing the different countries that Paul visited on his second missionary journey is not really going to help me deal with problems that I have at work. Completing the song line: “Sing us a song, you’re the piano man” does not help when I have an argument with my wife.

While Jeopardy focuses on the trivial, we can have knowledge of more important things and weightier topics. For example, we know the other people in our family in a much deeper way than just the brute facts about them. Our hobbies are another place where we can find this more robust knowledge. Both of my boys are into Marvel movies. When we go to one, they can talk about the backstory about this character and how the movie was different from the comics. I sit there and all I have to say is that I liked the movie. Their knowledge of that topic is significant. They do not just know the facts.

So what is my point? What kind of knowledge should we have of the Bible, God, The Gospel, and Theology in general: trivial or robust? Okay, that was an easy question. Obviously, we should have as robust knowledge of God that we can. Great. Which is easier to teach: trivial or robust knowledge? Unfortunately, trivial knowledge is fact based and is right or wrong. It is easy to teach, correct, reproof, and train basic facts into people as opposed to making them think. I am not saying that we should not teach kids the names of the books of the Bible. I am not saying that we should not encourage Bible Memorization. I am not saying that we should not push our kids to work on their Awana workbooks. What I am say is that those things do not translate to a deeper walk with God. We need to get kids out from thinking just because they know the facts, they know what they need to know. I was that kid. I knew the right answers. I knew God broadly but never knew him deeply.

The key to getting kids to know God deeper is to ask better questions. A webcast from Truth78 said it this way: we need to ask questions that lead to Biblical conclusions that are linked to practical applications in their lives. We need to “blow their minds” with deep questions or push back on their pat answers so that they can see their “trivial” answers just won’t cut it in the real world. We need to make sure that we are teaching for the right kind of knowledge to make it easier to connect with the heart. How is that done? We will talk about it next time.