The Fear of Knowledge

During my quiet time i just had to ask myself a difficult question: Have i grown at all over these past several years? I'm not thinking about mental or emotional or physical growth, but rather spiritual growth. i know that i've matured mentally and emotionally and all that, but spiritually, has there been much change? some times i want to say yes and some times i have to say no. i've learned a lot more about my faith, that's for sure. i love being a Bible major. there's nothing else i would rather study than the Bible. but in times like this it feels like a burden. there's so many more things i know about now about God and the Bible than i did 3 years ago, but how has that impacted my spiritual life? it feels like a burden when i learn of these things from the Bible that most likely never happened. sometimes i think i feel scared to research too much--scared of what i might find, that it will make my faith crumble and i won't have anything left to stand on. my methodology when it comes to research and study is that if you go into your study with a bias, you skew the truth, so i've always tried to analyze objectively and trust that the objective truth will point to Jesus (which, ironically, is still a bias). i'm scared of what i might find if i'm too objective. i'm scared that none of this will be true. i've built my whole life on this stuff. i'm nothing without it anymore. two summers ago, when i had a huge crisis of faith, and i was considering giving up and walking away, the only thing that held me back from that was that Christianity is my whole life, my major, my career path, my social circle--everything. if i walk away from that, i'm nothing. it was fear that held me back, even though i'm glad it did.

i know that there's a big difference between book knowledge and really knowing God. i could study all my life and read every book about Christianity and never get closer to God as a result. so where has all this newfound knowledge gotten me? there's so much of the Christian faith that i'm not even sure i believe in anymore, at least in my day to day living. i don't really believe in miracles, at least nowadays. i'm not sure how i feel about prayer. it was so much easier when i was a teenager and on fire for God, coupled with a blissful ignorance of the realities of the Bible and history.

i do think that knowledge is good. i am glad that i know all these things. but it just scares the crap out of me sometimes and my desire to hold on to some of that lost innocence keeps me from seeking more. my prayer is that God will show me how to turn my knowledge into an application of the heart. a quote by Brennan Manning that i love (and need) is "…intelligence without courage is bankrupt. The truth of faith has little value when it is not also the life of the heart." so may God give me courage. to do what i don't really know. but i need some.