Author: Jojo Agot

Few weeks ago I sat down with a couple who asked me to officiate their upcoming wedding. After talking about the ups and down of their love story, our discussion quickly turned to the rigors of wedding preparations. Since my fiancée and I are also getting married very soon, we felt like we are on the same boat facing the same sets of difficulties. We talked about the usual suspects: the challenge of coming up with a guest list, the drama of choosing the motif, the obvious gap between the dream wedding and the budget constraints, and the little things in between like fonts and chairs and table runners. Two hours into our conversation we just sat there stunned at the fact that weddings are far too complicated than we anticipated. We had to ask the obvious: what are the bare essentials of a wedding ceremony?

You’ve heard it many times.

“It is not enough to know God; you have to experience him.”
“It is not enough to know the Bible; you have to obey it.”
“Knowledge is useless; you have to have a passionate relationship with God.”

We often love to shoot ourselves in the foot. Unintentionally, of course.

We often say that Bible knowledge can lead to pride so we kind of tell one another that too much study of God’s Word is counterproductive to our spiritual health. It makes a person proud, they say. It’s useless knowledge, others argue.

Then we stumble over verses like Colossians 1:9–10 and we eat our words in embarrassment. Paul told the believers in Colossae that the way to stay solid in your Christian faith is to actually become filled with knowledge in all spiritual wisdom and understanding. That’s a lot of heavy words. Putting together knowledge, wisdom, and understanding in one sentence is mind-boggling enough for our taste. But Paul is not yet done; he was just getting started. He said that knowledge should fill us, the same way that you fill a tank with water. Why?

Because having that kind of knowledge is the only way to ever walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, to live a life that is pleasing to him, to bear fruit (in evangelism and in character), to be strengthened, and to develop a thankful heart. In other words, being filled with the knowledge of God is the way to thrive and flourish as a believer. Everything we ever want to become as Christians is tied to how much we know God, and that knowledge springs from our Bible readings.

Sounds too academic and too cerebral, I know, but this is God’s ordained way for us to grow. Knowing God is knowing God’s Word, the Bible. There is no escaping it. Much of our spiritual growth boils down to a lot of Bible reading and prayer. Even obedience is simply a fruit of knowing God. Either we admit that, or we continue shooting ourselves in the foot.

Christopher J.H. Wright on the The Mission of God’s People:

“Theology, it seems is all about God. It rummages around in what (mostly dead) people have thought and written about God, God’s character and actions, God’s relationship to the world, to human society, God’s involvement in the past, present and future, and the like. Mission, in happy contrast, is all about us the living, and what we believe we are supposed to be doing in the world.

“So, in mutual suspicion, theologians may not relish their theories being muddled by facts on the ground and the challenging questions thrown up by the messiness of practical mission. Practitioners of mission, in quick riposte, may not wish to see their urgent commitment to getting on with the job Christ entrusted to us delayed by indulgent navel-gazing about obscure long words ending in -ology.

“And so the dangerous result is that theology proceeds without missional input or output, while mission proceeds without theological guidance or evaluation.

“There should be no theology that that does not relate to the mission of the church – either by being generated out of the church’s mission or by inspiring and shaping it. And there should be no mission of the church carried on without deep theological roots in the soil of the Bible.

No theology without missional impact; no mission without theological foundations.”