I love the start of a new school year. I love new crayon boxes and unsharpened pencils. Fresh notebooks and blank calendars. Rulers and colored pencils and backpacks and empty folders. They all scream to me the anticipation of something new and special and amazing is about to happen. New discoveries and experiences and abundant potential!
Really, I love learning. I love new insight into words that have seemed so old. To watch an old, familiar movie and hear a turn of phrase in a new light brings me joy.
It’s the same reason I love teaching. To see the sparkle in a person’s eyes as they grasp a hard concept or as God reveals to them a truth from His word – it makes all the preparation worthwhile!
Yet not all study leads to truth. In first and second Timothy , Paul is warns Timothy and the church of false doctrine and the dangers of living like those who do not know the Hope of Jesus Christ.
2 Timothy 3:1-5, “But know this: Difficult times will come in the last days. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, proud, blasphemers, disboedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, without love for what is good, traitors, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to the form of godliness buy denying it in power. Avoid these people!”
Paul clearly lays out the dangers!
Then he goes on to address women specifically.
Recently, I have done much studying on Paul and his writing to women. My old mindset of Paul as a chauvanist has been changed to that of seeing Paul as a big brother. A brother who elevated his sisters by simply mentioning them in text then loved them so much, he wanted them educated. A brother who knew amazing sisters as teachers – Priscilla, Phoebe. Paul had great concern that ALL peoples – male and female – come to relationship with the Christ and that they no longer have to live like the world. He is not the chastising, domineering, macho man I had read into him but rather a man who saw women as God’s creations, equal by differently equipped.
2 Timothy 3:6,7, “For among them are those who worm their way into households and capture idle women burdened down with sins, led along by a variety of passions, always learning and never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.”
Wait –
ALWAYS LEARNING AND NEVER ABLE TO COME TO A KNOWLEDGE OF THE TRUTH
The word “knowledge” is from the greek “epignosis”. It means to recognize and have acomplete, full knowledge of a subject. Therefore, to “know” truth would be to recognize the divine nature of God and accept all asepts of Him as He reveals himself to you.
Have I moved to “knowledge of truth?” Do I live like it? Or am I stuck in a continuous learning cycle and not moving forward?
It would be as if a child continued to prepare for kindergarten every year. Imagine 18 year old kindergartners! Yet, we have 60 year olds sitting in churches still learning the lessons of infant Christians despite decades in the church.
Conversely, we have 20 year old Christians with great spiritual maturity because they have learned and accepted the truth and are living it out!
Where am I on this continuum? Maturing daily or constantly wavering? Learning and growing or learning and relearning and relearning?
Where are you?
Father, forgive me for not learning lessons wisely. For reverting to my old ways instead of sitting in the knowledge of truth: You are God; You are Good; You are Gracious; I am your child. Let me grow in Love, in Good Conscience and in a sincere Faith, knowing that I can always trust you.
Complicated Hope 
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