This week's spiritual practice is the practice of study.

When I read Richard Foster's book Celebration of Discipline 25 years ago for the first time I almost skipped this chapter. It seemed like all we ever did as Church people was study. There was Sunday School and Sermons and Bible Studies and personal Bible reading. Every day, every week...we would open the Bible and study to understand the Bible. We believed that if we changed our minds with knowledge our whole lives would be changed by the knowledge itself. If we just knew what God wanted, then at least there was a chance we could do it.

This was the "knowledge is power" era. Culturally in post civil rights era America we believed that education was the silver bullet, the one thing that could make society work. If everyone was smarter and knew more stuff, the world would be a better place. The church had Bible verses that we would trot out too:

Proverbs 1:7 — "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge."

Hosea 4:6 — "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge."

John 8:32 — "You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."

Colossians 1:10 — Bear fruit in every good work and grow in the knowledge of God.

In no other time in history was there more Bible knowledge than the end of the 20th century. It was the cultural apex of Bible knowledge because every corner of the church was studying hard, starting and building Bible Colleges and seminaries, training their kids in Bible quizzing and Awana memorization challenges.

But here is the thing. The church convulsed, and heaved under the weight of the pressure to know more....because knowing more did not make us better. I meet up with friends who are around my age, were faithful followers of Jesus for 30+ years and left the church the last 10 years, deconstructed and vanished. They know more Bible than most of you. They can quote it to you in multiple versions. But knowing about God does not bring you closer to God...ironically. The demons know maybe even more about God than any of us do, especially those who enjoyed his presence in heaven before the fall.

Knowing does not make you good.

So is the answer to study less? No. The answer is to study differently — and for different reasons.

Listen in to hear more!