up there, and I didn't want to be sharing every conversation I had before the service with you all. That's a great sign. How many times do you guys use that in a week? Anyway, did you all hear what I said before that? No, okay. Turn in your Bibles to 2 Peter chapter 3. 2 Peter chapter 3. You might not need to turn there, but we'll get to that in a moment. And I want to, something that I think... Whoa, no. Did I say Siri or did I say Google or something? Anyway, it's talking back. Anyway, I didn't understand that. Just turn it off, just like push the button till it dies. Anyway, we, last summer and this summer, have been going through, studying various disciplines or exercises in godliness that the Bible teaches us we should practice. The Lord has saved us, and he saved us to be conformed to the image of his son. But confirmation or conformation is not something that just happens by sitting around and doing what we were doing before we got saved. The Bible is full of these, I don't know if they're paradoxes or ironies, where God is so powerful, he could do everything, but yet, He doesn't. There's a human element to it. I think the climax of that is the Lord Jesus Christ himself. He is deity himself and yet he became a man. And then you have the writing of our scriptures. God could have just... placed them here, you know, on paper himself, but he used men to do that. And even in salvation, salvation, everything is of the Lord, but it's not like he just saves, you know, he works in us and we have to respond to him in order to be saved. And the same is with growth. We've talked about many of them. We reviewed several at the beginning of the summer, getting the Bible into our life through preaching, reading the Bible, studying it, meditating on it, memorizing it, and that, praying, worshiping the Lord. stewardship, evangelism, and others. The last few weeks we've talked about just how important it is to find times when we're alone and quiet, silence and solitude. If we're living in a, we live in a world that loves noise and activity, and if we never get out of that, we make it very hard to grow or for the Lord even to speak to us through his word. And so, this week we're gonna begin looking at the discipline of learning. Now, learning is, in my mind, is very closely related to studying the Bible, of course. We said one of the things about Bible intake is studying the Bible, but I think learning just takes it a little bit further, maybe not just the Bible, but everything that the Bible talks about, which is everything else, including, you know, the Bible relates to everything, and so learning, is, and hopefully you'll see by the end of this week, that the Bible teaches us that we ought to be learners, that the Lord expects us to be learners, lifelong learners. I know we, our human nature is to think you learn in school and when you're done with school, you're done. You don't need to learn anything else. But as soon as we think that through for a couple seconds, we know that that's not the truth. Now, some of you might have met or listened to someone with an overgrown theological brain. But they had a pygmy-like, passionless heart. We've heard of teachers or preachers who could be, you know, whatever, the theological anchor of the Mensa club, but their, I didn't make this up, but I couldn't not say it, their Christianity seemed as dry and stale as the inside of a basketball. I've never been on the inside of a basketball, but I imagine that that must be very dry and stale there. Neither of those really, that doesn't at all sound like the Lord Jesus Christ though, does it? We also may have heard or even said this idea, I never liked school, and I don't wanna learn something when I come to church. I would never say that, but we might, we might say I just wanna go to church to be uplifted, I just wanna be encouraged, I don't wanna have to learn something. But there's something... unlike Jesus in that attitude as well. There's some reason, and it's not, I'm of course forcing this dichotomy or whatever, binary choice, but sometimes we get thinking that way. We shouldn't think that we have to choose between the two. Like the Bible said, choose ye this day whom ye will serve, scholarship or devotion. Devotion, we think of devotion as a fire, But a fire can't burn if it doesn't have fuel. And our burning heart, if it doesn't have anything in the head to feed that fire, it will just go out. We cannot be the type of Christians that have zeal without knowledge. So does that mean we have to be brilliant? Do we have to, Dr. Shriver's looking at me right there, paying close attention, continually adding to his knowledge. But he might even think, I got 160 credit hours, I think, past my two bachelor's degrees. I'm done. Okay, but none of us, I guess I'm spoiling the lesson, we can never even be that far and think, I'm done learning. We don't have to be brilliant, but we do need to be like Jesus. We must be learners. At only the age of 12, Right? They found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them and asking questions. And all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers. Now, we might say, well, he was 12. Of course, he needed to learn something. But he was God. And he gave us that example. Does it mean that we have to have lots of diplomas? Do we need to get several degrees? I'm pointing at him, I have several degrees too, but it's easier to point at him. Do we all have to go to college and go to seminary and get more and more and more degrees? No. Jesus didn't have any degrees, but we should discipline ourselves to learn. Remember when they said about Jesus, how knoweth this man letters having never learned? How did this man get such learning without having studied? They're saying. He never went to special school and yet he knows. You know the word disciple doesn't just mean to be a follower. We often kind of think of that way, all the hundreds of disciples that followed Jesus around. But the word disciple includes the idea of being a learner. To follow Christ and become more like him, we must work at, engage in the discipline of learning. And it's the discipline, because exercise is never natural. It's just not, not to our fallen, Heart, mind, and even body. 1 Timothy 4, 7 says, but refuse profane and old wise fables and exercise thyself rather unto godliness. Now, let's think about 2 Peter 3, 18. If you've looked at it, you said, I already know this verse. We learned this verse, it's the green page in the wordless book, right? But grow, right? But grow. So, Right there we see that the Christian life is a call to growth. Immature, immaturity or a longing for immaturity is sin. It's opposite to that. But grow. We shouldn't want to just sit where we are. I probably over preach this to the teenagers and all in my interactions with them. But we're to grow to young college students. Our world loves immaturity, doesn't it? It does. There's certain streaks that might not fit this generality, but all the magazines at the grocery store are trying to tell you how you can look younger. And the ladies hate it when I hit this point. But what is that? At its root, it's like, I don't want to grow up. The men. We can be bombarded by, I don't know, what you see on YouTube or on a show or something. You see grown men in whatever type of show, they're dressed like teenagers. Why? Because the television show is trying to get us to think that that's normal for grown men to look like teenagers. It's trying to tell teenagers that it's just fine to stay the way you are for 20, 30, 40 years. That's the world's philosophy. The Bible says, but grow. And it keeps going, it says, but grow in grace. But what I wanna focus on here is it says, but grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. I think as Christians, we often think, yeah, I need to grow in grace, so I need to go to church, I need to listen to that, I need to, if my heart goes like this, I need to respond to that and all that, and that would be, in my mind, growing in grace, but the Bible doesn't say just to grow in grace, it says grow in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Let me just ask you, what does Jesus know? Could we grow into that? Yeah, because he knows everything. He knows everything about what it means to be a Christian. Does he know anything beside that? Yeah. He knows everything that's right to know about government. He knows everything that's right to know about economics. He knows everything that's right to know about the way life is, that you might find reading literature or something like that. He knows everything that there is to know about mathematics and science and engineering. We can always grow in the knowledge that Jesus has. We'll never, not even through eternity, Not even through eternity. It's not like we'll get to heaven and all of a sudden we'll be like God. We won't. We will spend eternity always learning, always growing. And so we should be doing that now. But grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior. Even after they had said about Jesus, he was in the temple, he was hearing and asking them questions. After that, at the end of that chapter, the Bible says in Luke 2.52, and Jesus increased in wisdom. and stature, and in favor with God, and man. And so, there's four areas there, and most people that study that verse see wisdom as being the intellectual, stature as being the physical, favor with God as being the spiritual, and favor with man as being social. Those are all areas that, just like categories in our lives that we can say, yep, yep, yep, and Jesus grew, increased in all of those. So, what does Jesus know? Colossians 119 says, for it pleased the Father that in Him should all fullness dwell. That's coming, it's said in another context, but yet it's true. Jesus is God and He knows everything. He created everything. He knows everything that they're going to invent a hundred years from now. With a hundred years of progress between now and then, He already knows. He already knows it. And so in a sense, even, and I'm getting off track, but even as a civilization, it's right for us to grow our knowledge. Because we're growing in the things that God knows. And of course, as human beings, we corrupt that, we distort it, we pervert it, we use that knowledge for evil and wicked things. But that doesn't mean that the knowledge, the growing in knowledge is wrong. It's actually following what the Bible teaches us. So, that's the introduction. Learning We're going to get to this, conclude with it that this is a discipline that we have to do, but first let's think some more about learning. Learning, the Bible shows us, a learning characterizes a wise person. We say the word wise, we think the book of Proverbs. So Proverbs was written to give us wisdom, to talk about instruction, and it shows that a wise man, one of the characteristics of a wise man is a desire for learning. Proverbs 9.9. Proverbs 9.9 says, give instruction to a wise man and he will be yet wiser. Now let that, I'll just stop. Give instruction to a wise man and he will be yet wiser. Think of that. Have you ever given instruction to someone and they didn't get wiser? Why? Because they didn't think it was important, they refused it. And what was that person? They were really a fool, but they thought they were so smart they didn't need what you had to give them. But the Bible says a wise person, and the Bible says they're wise. Not they said they're wise, right? We think, well, I know enough, I don't need to learn anymore. But the wise person gets instruction, he gets instruction, he says, oh wow, I could use that. So he receives, he will be yet wiser. Wise and righteous people can never get enough wisdom or knowledge. And those that are prideful and unteachable, they just show how shallow they really are. Someone who's wise and receives instructions shows really also how humble they are. If you really are a pretty smart person, you could say, well, I don't need that. I already know that. Right? But a really wise person says, I could learn that. I could learn from this person. I could learn from that person. I could learn from a lot of different people. willing to admit how much they have yet to learn. Wise people are looking to learn. There's a principle that I teach in one of my education classes, and I draw a little circle. Some of you younger people in my class, you might remember this illustration. I draw a circle. A circle represents this idea, kind of. Inside the circle represents what you know, And the edges of their circle represent what you think you don't know. So if you know this much, you think there's hardly a thing you don't know. But the more you know, the more you understand how much you don't know. The world is made by an infinite God. There's so much more to learn. I don't have time to give the illustration, but I'll just mention it. You can go into the depths of the jungle in Suriname and run across a guy who has a Cedar Point captain's hat on. He's the head of the village. He thinks he's got the world by the tail. Nobody's more important than him. And a missionary can come who can speak three languages and knows the gospel and sit there. My dad experienced this. There's a funeral or a person died and their body with the fluids is just running out of it out of a box just 10 feet away from this great tribal meeting. And but but if the missionary doesn't know the language or the person doesn't know the language of the tribal chief with his his shorts and his cedar point captain's hat. He looks at the person who really knows a lot more than him as an imbecile. He doesn't know how to talk to me. And we can get very much the same way even if we're not in the jungles. It's human nature. Proverbs also tells us that wise men lay up knowledge. In Proverbs 10, 14, it says, wise men lay up knowledge, but the mouth of the foolish is near destruction. So here, the word means to store it up like a treasure. So they find knowledge, they keep it. They store it up. They recognize its value. Wise Godly people recognize that knowledge is a treasure. To use a kind of a negative example of this, imagine if you had no access to knowledge. The pastor whose resources I'm using a lot of here talks about he was on a missions trip to Kenya. And he met a school teacher that was in his 30s. Some of you are not in your 30s yet, but imagine being in your 30s. If it was a long time ago, still imagine being in your 30s. You were well out of school and all that. And this guy's a school teacher in his 30s. He lived. in the back of a store that was one of only four buildings in the community he lived in. There's only four buildings in the community he lived in, and he lived in the back of that store. He walked several miles further into the bush each day to an elementary school where he taught, and each day he'd return to his cube. Where he lived was eight feet by eight feet by eight feet. That's all he had. There was a twin bed against the back wall and a sheet to separate that room from the rest of the room. And in the rest of the room was just a table and a chair. And the pastor said as he went into that room, he saw that on every wall were several pages stuck on the wall of old magazines. It was the only thing he owned that he could read. He was a school teacher. The only books he ever came in contact with were left at the school where he was. He could go there, he could look at them, they were used, they were old. He could look at them, but he couldn't bring them home. He was so poor that even though he'd been a Christian for a while, he didn't have a Bible. But he would sit there, Rock his child to sleep, eat his breakfast, whatever, and just read those words. That was all the knowledge that he had, but he knew he wasn't about to throw that knowledge away. Because of its scarcity, he recognized how precious it was. But knowledge isn't precious just because it's scarce. So just think about that. What if all the knowledge you had was just whatever was in some magazines from 20 years ago? You didn't know anything else. You couldn't read anything else. Of course, as a human being, you would know stuff, you'd learn stuff through observation, but you couldn't read anything else. You couldn't learn from anyone else, but just stuff that was written a long time ago. But he still held on to it because he recognized its value. We have so much more available to us, and we don't recognize its value. Proverbs 18.15, another point along this line, says, So seek, seeketh is in the present tense, seeks. He seeks it. He seeks it. He's going out and he's seeking it. Wise people don't just acquire knowledge, they seek it. They're looking for more. they desire to learn. Proverbs 23, 12, apply thine heart unto instruction and thine ears to the words of knowledge. So no matter how much we know, we still need to apply our heart to learn more. We haven't learned it all, we've already kind of said that. The more we learn, the more we should understand that there's so much even more to learn and so we can keep learning. No matter how intelligent we are or how slow you think you are, We all must diligently apply our heart and our ears to learn. And so this helps us see that learning is a discipline. We have to apply our heart to it. It doesn't go right in line with our fallen human nature. So if we're going to be wise, and the Bible says we should be wise, we need to learn. The next thing about understanding that learning is something that God expects from us is fulfilling the great commandment. We know this, but I'll read it. Mark 12, 29 through 30. 29 and 30 says, and Jesus answered him, the first of all commandments is Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord, and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. This is the first commandment. What God most wants from us is our love, right? But one of the ways he wants us to show our love is through learning, is with our mind. Yes, with our heart. Yes, with our strength. Yes, with our soul. So our heart, maybe the spiritual element of us. Our soul, the element of us that connects with the world. We should love him more than the things of this world. Our strength, we should offer our abilities to the Lord and with our mind. God is glorified when we use the mind he made to learn of him, his ways, his word, and his world. When I read that, and right now, of course, the Olympics are going on, I was reminded of classic Olympic film, Chariots of Fire. Of course, it's a film, there's probably some things in there that aren't entirely historically accurate, but it tells the story of two men, and one of which is a devout Christian, Eric Little. He's getting ready, he's supposed to, he's already dedicated to be a missionary to China, and his sister says, why, basically, why are you running? Why do you wanna be, you're just proud, you just wanna be in the Olympics to get fame for yourself, and you really, you know God wants you to be a missionary to China. And in his argument, in a discussion with his sister, he says, but God made me fast, and when I run, I feel the presence of God. I give glory to God by running with the fast legs that he gave me. And I'm paraphrasing there. But God made me fast. And God made every single one of us with a brain, with a mind that he wants to use for him. Don't let it turn to mush. We many times do not associate learning with loving God. We live in a very anti-intellectual age, which sounds kind of odd because the piles of knowledge that we get just, they just, knowledge increases. but what people do with it. I mean, it's increasing. Imagine how much it increased if everybody applied their minds to what the world's around us. It's just increasing at this level, even with people who hardly put any, with the majority of people not even caring about increasing knowledge. But anyway, we live in a very anti-intellectual age, and even some independent final Baptists, we've kind of got a reputation. I think, in some cases, wrongly so, but in other cases, rightly so. I don't mean to offend anybody, but bless God, I don't need any of that learning stuff. Seminary, the other word, the real word for seminary is cemetery. We kind of despise learning. Yes, people can elevate learning so much to the exclusion of the spiritual, but despising is not biblical. God gave us minds, we should use that. Our culture glorifies the physical and the material. Just step out of Christian culture and just think of our culture. Nobody sells posters of the top software engineers or architects. I don't think, you know, He's right there, so I'm going to point to him. He's Dr. Schreiber. He got his degree in engineering. He probably didn't have some engineer's picture on the wall when he was growing up in his room. It'd be hard to even find one. The world doesn't uplift that. What does the world uplift? I mean, if you want a poster for your room and you go into wherever they sell posters, what are you going to find? Okay, I'm gonna age myself here. You're gonna find Michael Jordan, right? You're gonna find who was, these I'm not as familiar with. You're gonna find Michael Jackson. You're gonna find some rock star. You're gonna find some sports star, some football guy. Those are who our culture lifts up. And how useful are those, I'm not saying they're not useful, but those occupations are about how useful. Sports is useful. but to the element to just worship it, to just like uplift it. Music is powerful. Anyway, we don't sell those posters. And even in churches, as human beings, we're tempted to think, oh, we want church to be relevant. We want church to just talk about what's going on today. And if somebody gets up and teaches theology or doctrine, it's like, OK, that's important, yeah, but how do I use it? We want everything to be practical. Well, practical just means practicing what you know. So everything can be practical. So there is a level of intellectualism that's wrong, but it's also wrong to be anti-intellectual. We're to love God just as much with our minds as with our heart and our soul and our strength. Another pastor wrote, God made us with a harmony of heart and head, of thought and action. The more we know him, the more we're able to love him. The more we love him, the more we seek to know him. To be central in our hearts, he must be foremost in our minds. Religious thought is the prerequisite to religious affection and obedient action. Do you remember when Jesus was talking to the woman at the well? Do you remember what religion she was? She was a Samaritan. Samaritans only looked at the Pentateuch. They had their own place of worship that was similar to what was in the five books of the law. They had their own things there. But Jesus said to them, ye worship ye know not what. We know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews. Now it's back in that day, but Christians today can even get to the point where we don't even know what we worship. We just follow, we just go through some motions and we don't even know that we could, unless we love God with our growing mind, we will become Christian versions of those Samaritans. All right, so learning is something that a wise man does. Proverbs teaches us that. Learning, growing in knowledge, is something that God expects when he says, love the Lord with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. And then, let's just point out that learning is essential for increased godliness. Romans 12, two. Remember that verse? One is I beseech you therefore, verse two, and be not conformed to this world. And what is in contrast with being conformed to this world? And be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed, how? By the renewing of your mind. We could sit here and hate what the world does, but if we don't renew our mind, And renewing our mind, I mean, how else do you renew your mind than by putting things into it? And you don't put things into it unless you're learning. So we're either gonna be conformed to the image of this world, because the world is gonna be around us, we are gonna see the things that the world wants us to, to some extent or more, or we're gonna be transformed by the renewing of our mind. growth that you may prove. What is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God? Growth in godliness involves mental renewal that can't happen without learning. And the alternative to transforming, being transformed by the renewing of our mind is conformity to the world. So growth expects, spiritual growth expects growth in learning. How is it that, let's back up a little bit more, how is it that faith is even exercised? Do you remember Romans 10, 14? You say, oh, I could quote it. No, but you'll recognize it. How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? I think it's right before that, it says, faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. So the world today likes to talk about faith, you know, just keep the faith. But faith that the world talks about, you just gotta believe. Right, you just gotta believe. I hear people, I just believe. Believe in what, right? Believe in what? Keep the faith, keep the faith in what? The world is full of this, like, hope, faith, believe, but they have nothing to believe in. They have nothing to set their faith on. And Christians do have something, but if you're not learning, the more you learn, the stronger your faith will be, the stronger your belief can be. We cannot, well, let's just go back to that still. This is why it's important when we present the gospel, that we present the facts of the gospel. We can't just say, we can't just have some spiritual, emotional experience and then say, how many wanna believe? Believe what? So you can't be saved just because you believe. Believe what? Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. And for that matter, the Lord Jesus Christ is not a jar of peanut butter. You say, that's blasphemous. Well, what is he? What is Jesus? That's who you have to believe on. So we have to know some things, right? Jesus to me is this. Jesus to me is this. You can't have the wrong knowledge and be saved by believing in something that's not true. So that's salvation, and that's just the first step. Let me just go back one more time. I'm not saying that you have to know and understand a full book on all the doctrines of Christianity in order to be saved, but you can't believe on a Jesus that's not represented in the Bible and be saved. So, and that's just salvation. And then the next step and the next step, the more we learn, the more we know, the more our faith can grow. We have to, in order for our faith to grow, we have to learn more about the Lord. We won't grow much in godliness if we don't know what it means to be godly. Have you ever talked to somebody and they think, well, I'm a pretty good person. and they're sitting there, you can look at them and say, well, they're controlled by these things, and they allow this stuff into their life, and they're like, I'm a pretty good person. Why do they think that? Because they don't know what a pretty good person is. When we witness, we have to explain what a pretty good person is, and there's only one pretty good person in the whole world, right? And he's more than pretty good. But what's happening there? Knowledge. And same for us with godliness. We can't be much godly if we don't know what it means to be godly. We can't become more like Christ if we don't know much what Christ is like. A great preacher from England, since passed away I think in the 80s, 1980s, said, let us never forget that the message of the Bible is addressed primarily to the mind and to the understanding. There are noble efforts to put the message of the Bible into video form. I see these if you subscribe to, you know, I get the two best news sources in the world, the Babylon Bee and not the Bee. You know, and there's the iBible. You know, they wanna make the Bible available to people who can't read just through visual mediums. But the Bible was written as words. So almost everything that we would learn from the Bible is addressed primarily to the mind and the understanding. No one is changed by an unread Bible. No one grows into godliness, into any kind of godliness that he doesn't know anything about. The word of God must go through our heads if it's going to change our hearts and lives. And I've talked to people, They'll say words from the Bible and they totally don't even understand the words that they're saying and so they've applied them in the wrong way. They're trying to do, they think they're doing what the Bible says and they don't even understand the Bible. So what do they need to do? They need to learn, they need to study. And people can help them with that. So the absence, but we, Independent Fundamental Baptist, Christians, human nature, doesn't like this discipline either, even as much as any other. And so the absence of the discipline of learning explains why many, many Christians aren't very godly, aren't very strong Christians. Another pastor makes a similar point. He's using the word study, but here again, I would say study and learning go right together. He says, many Christians remain in bondage to fears and anxieties simply because they do not avail themselves of the discipline of study. They may be faithful in church attendance and earnest in fulfilling their religious duties, and still they are not changed. He says, I'm not speaking only of those who are going through mere religious forms, but of those who are genuinely seeking to worship and obey Jesus Christ as Lord and Master. They may sing with gusto, pray, live as obediently as they know how, and yet their lives remain unchanged. Why? Because they've never taken up one of the central ways God uses to change us. Study. You can live as well as you know how, But if you don't study to know how, you're only obeying this far. And all you'd have to do is study more, and then there'd be more to obey, more to grow. Studying and learning. Finally, on this point, besides... More conformity to the world and a lack of growth in godliness, those who don't discipline themselves to learn and to study have very little spiritual discernment. And they become prime targets of cults. It's sad, but it's true. Some of the, one of the highest former religions in like Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons are Baptists. And almost all of those that are in cults grew up in some type of a Christian background. The cults just steal people, but how does somebody, maybe you haven't, but we've had lessons on what the Mormons believe, and what the Jehovah's Witnesses believe, and you're sitting there like, how could anybody believe that? Former Christians believe that, because they don't have discernment that they could have if they'd studied the Bible. We must learn to be like Jesus. We must learn to be like Jesus and Jesus learned, he increased in knowledge. What did Jesus know? Yeah, like what did Jesus do? W-D, W-J-D-D, whatever it is. What did Jesus do? What did Jesus know? We're to grow into that. And so then the next point, and I'm just gonna stop by mentioning it, is, well, I have a few more minutes. Learning is mostly by discipline, not by accident. This illustration made me smile, so I'm gonna use it. Every dust ball gets bigger the longer it rolls around under the bed. And so every mind picks up at least a little knowledge as it rolls around on the earth. You do get to be a little smarter. But we cannot assume that we have learned true wisdom just by getting older. Whoever was saying this in Job, I didn't look it up, and I probably should have, but Job 32.9 says, Great men are not always wise. Neither do the aged understand judgment. And Psalm, I think it's 119, tells us, and I don't have it quoted, but it came to my mind right here, is that the psalmist understood more than his teachers because he obeyed the law of the Lord. So just, A, getting older, Proverbs tells us, you know, that the hoary head and all of that, getting older is good, it's something, as opposed to this world that loves immaturity, getting older is something that's good, but just getting older doesn't make you wiser or smarter. It takes discipline. First Timothy 4.7 says, exercise thyself rather unto godliness. Those that are not trying to learn will only get spiritual and biblical knowledge by accident or by convenience. Occasionally they'll hear a biblical fact or principle from someone else and they'll profit from it. Once in a while they'll get a burst of interest in a subject but then that'll die away and that is not the way toward godliness. We need the discipline of learning to help us to be intentional and not accidental learners. It's a lot easier to be an accidental learner. or a convenient learner than intentionally. We're born that way. Television, spoon feeds us, that inclination just to, this was even before me, so anyway. Sesame Street, you know, we discovered television and we thought, oh, what a powerful way to learn something. But it's not really. It is a powerful way to learn something, but it's very limited in what you can learn. And you can hardly train your brain to think by learning stuff on television. Anyway, that's a side note. Watching YouTube is so much easier than choosing a good book, reading words, creating your own mental images, and relating it to your life. Isn't it easy just to hit the next one? Oh, that looks interesting. Oh, that's interesting. I've always wondered about that. Click, click, and pretty soon, oh, I'm so tired. I can't read this book. I wanted to do that, but maybe tomorrow. Images are so much easier, but so much less, whatever, helpful. Books are just too demanding for our modern minds. It takes discipline to be an intentional learner. And I'll just point out that every generation must work at this. And I'm gonna have to stop there, because this next illustration or whatever talking about that is a little bit long. But we can't just say this generation has a problem with this. Every generation has had a problem with this. And the reason every generation has a problem with this is because every generation are human beings. And human beings have a fallen nature that resists what's good for it. God is what's good for it. God is what's good for us. What God expects is what's good for us, and we resist that. We're bent away from that. So next week, we will just review what we've gone through here and then pick up and finish this lesson on learning and try to just help us. I will say, I like to learn things, but you could tell by the way I was talking about YouTube, that I've clicked next several times myself. So I'm not standing here as the model, just be like me. Christ is the model. This series is very challenging to me, and sometimes quite convicting, but so much so that I thought it's good to share with all of you. So you could take that how you want, you could say, He just wants some deniability. Just do what I say, not as I do. That's not kind of what I'm saying. I'm saying this stuff is stuff I need to work on and hopefully it'll help you and we can all work on it and grow more disciplined, more godly. And checking these things off don't make us godly, right? As we work in these areas, the Lord meets us there as we've said and he does the work in us that makes us more like his son. Let's pray.