This week a dear friend came to lay out the problem he’s going through. He dropped the ball and did something ugly. The church he’s part of, like most churches, gave him a nice kick in the rear and put him “on the bench,” because he “missed the target and lost his reference.”
This is very common in churches. There’s a pattern you have to fit into, and if you commit different sins from theirs, you can’t be part of the little group; you go to the bench until you go back to committing only the sins they accept.
I don’t want to pat my friend on the head here. He knows he dropped the ball, it’s not the first time, and he’s been seeking help to get better. And that’s exactly where our conversation started getting interesting. He came to ask me, “How does someone change?”
This friend of mine, like me and many of you reading, has racked up hundreds of hours sitting in church pews listening to sermons. He can recite verses better than many fanatic fans can name their team’s lineup. This guy knows the Christian methodology, attended Bible school, Bible study, devotional, has read the famous books and sings the trendy songs… so how, after 25 years, do you keep changing?
I almost always prefer questions over answers, and that’s how I responded to the question “How do I change?”: “Why do you want to change?”
He was honest again. He said he wants to change because he wants to be accepted in the little group again. He wants to be part of the band, or the church’s businessmen group, or the prayer team… he wants to “be part of,” and that’s why he wants to change.
The most interesting thing is that he, like me, can quickly list 50 reasons why those people are not the standard of Christian we should follow, but even so, he wants to change to look even more like them! That’s so strange and so common to me. We criticize the church, but we want to be part of it, and since it has predetermined rules, we have no option but to fall in line.
What’s interesting is that the Bible isn’t like that. The Bible isn’t this “Christian life manual”, as if life were a microwave and you just had to read the manual to have objective answers about what your next step is.
If you doubt me, take a look with me at these two verses from Proverbs chapter 26:
4 - Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you yourself will be just like him.
5 - Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes.
Wait… am I supposed to answer or not?!? And that’s just one example. I could list 10 more from Proverbs alone. And you don’t have to go far: Should you marry your girlfriend or not? Should you change jobs? Should you move to another country? What about listening to “worldly” music or not? Kissing on the mouth before marriage? Maybe it’s time to switch to that other church? And that new diet, should you do it or not? … there, did you see? I don’t have to go far to make my point clear.
Looking at the Bible as a map for life can leave you feeling kind of dizzy. Which of the two should I do? What’s the answer? Bible, JUST TELL ME WHAT TO DO.
No way. Proverbs doesn’t tell its readers WHAT to do, because the book of Proverbs wants to TEACH WISDOM.
Wisdom is not knowing how to find the answer to questions so that everything magically works. Wisdom is about learning how to deal with the unpredictable and uncontrollable mess of our lives so that we can come up with answers ourselves when needed.
Wisdom, as we see in the book of Proverbs, doesn’t tell us WHAT TO DO. It shapes us over time so that when the day comes when we have to make a decision, we can do it wisely.
Asking WHAT God wants me to do is the wrong question. God is more interested in who I am than in what I’m going to do. He wants me to have wisdom and to learn the lesson, not to be able to quickly fill out a test sheet with memorized answers.
And you can think of Proverbs as a “free sample” of how the WHOLE BIBLE works. The Bible is a book that shows us what a life of faith looks like.
Sitting around waiting for the Bible to tell me “exactly what to do” means we’ll either stay frozen forever, silent, paralyzed and without making decisions, or we’ll end up making decisions based on a Bible verse that, let’s be honest, has as much to do with this moment of our life as a Shakespeare book has to do with how to fix the engine of my car.
Like every good story, the Bible shapes us by bringing us into its world and inviting us to see ourselves better through its light.
That’s how the Bible works as a guide for the faithful — by being a story, not by being a list of dos and don’ts disguised as a story.
I don’t want answers to all my questions, I want better questions. That’s how you change.