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Do You Believe That You Are Educated?
Being Grounded in Jesus Christ and in the Scriptures

By
Okey L. King

It is my belief that there are very few, if any, who become truly educated. The scope of God’s creation is much to great for one to grasp enough of it in one lifetime to consider oneself to be educated. At the age of 52, I once told a college professor that, “I am like a man lying on the beach on his stomach trying to suck up the ocean with a straw and weeping because he could not.” That is how I am with learning. However, I believe that you can achieve a foundation for an education. Once you have established that foundation, then you can build on that foundation for as long as you have a functional mind.

For a Christian, I believe that reaching a foundation for an education involves a two-step process.

The first step is to be sure that you are grounded in Jesus Christ and the Scriptures.

One: This calls for a child-like faith in God. This faith is essential for a sound relationship with God.

Two: God must be number one in your life, “Thou shalt have not other God before me.” This commandment goes with the first one below.

Three: In Matthew 22:37-40 and in Mark 12: 28-31, Christ teaches us that we must love the Lord our God with all our might and being and love our neighbor as we love ourselves. Christ said that all of the law and the prophets hang from these two commandments. That means everything in our lives hangs and descends from and through these two commandments. Christ said that no other commandments are greater than these.

Four: You must understand that you are called to be different from the world. I call this being different being a radical. We are not to be a radical in legalism. We are to be a radical in the Grace of God and the agape love of Jesus Christ.

Five: God created you and he has a special call on your life. I believe that basic call is to win the lost. You may be gifted in many areas, but winning the lost is the reason we are Christians.

Six: There is no part of your life that dose not come under Jesus Christ. We have one life undivided: the life of a Christian.

Seven: You are a spiritual warrior. That warfare is prayer and the battlefield is the human mind. The gate to the harvest field is prayer. To be a prayer warrior, we need to know the enemy. The only weapon Satan has is a lie. If we know this, then his lies cannot stop us in our praying or in anything else we do for God.

Eight: I believe that it is essential to be sanctified and filled with the Holy Spirit.

Nine: You must study and know the scriptures. You must do this by personal study with prayer, and not by just listening to someone else expound on the Word of God.

I believe that the second step to a foundation for an education, for both the Christian and the non-Christian, is the achievement of the ability to think for oneself. Without this ability, there is not much hope of reaching a true education. Merely repeating or parroting what someone else says is not the pursuit of an education. It is easy to try to look smart by quoting some known individual. But, it is not so easy to come to your own conclusions and to be able to state those conclusions to others without fear of ridicule.

I believe that there are spiritual gifts that are not normally listed such as the essential spiritual gift of a sense of humor. I believe that another one of these gifts is the spiritual gift of common sense. Common sense is essential if you are to become truly educated. Having said that let me say that common sense applies to the explainable things of life. But, common sense fails miserably when used to explain the mysteries of God.

For the Christian student of God’s creation, which includes everything material and immaterial, this means that you do not accept everything that you are taught, even from a Christian source, without first running it through the Christ, Scripture and common sense mill. Never make a guru out of your teacher or any other earthly person. Take what is good and add it to your storehouse and ignore what is not so good. You may also find it necessary to discard pre-learned material. So, my advice is, “Never fall in love with what you have learned.”

For a non-Christian, there is only one step to a foundation to an education. That step is that of learning to think for yourself. But, the non-Christian doesn’t have the benefit of the knowledge of Jesus Christ and the Scriptures. Their only hope in reaching a true education is natural common sense. Perhaps common sense without Christ is critically flawed. Therefore, that hope in reaching that education may be naturally flawed.

Perhaps a great truth of a true education is the knowledge that you can never learn all of the mysteries of God in this life. Some things we will never learn until after we here the Father say, “Enter in my good and faithful servant to the glories of your Lord.” Amen!