Vow IV: Study

a transformed life

Due to our context on the campus of a seminary, this is the easiest of all the vows for me to visualize. Studying for tests, reading books, writing papers - these are all things I associate with study. Yet I find more often than not I don't feel transformed at all by these activities.

How does reading systematic theology transform me? Or memorizing Hebrew flash cards? Or reading about a culture that's been dead for 2,000 years? How does sitting in a lecture for two and a half hours make me more like Jesus? Or locking myself in my room until the paper is finished? Or reading until my eyes lock shut from exhaustion?

Maybe there's something more to study. I'd like to think there is. The author Henry James once wrote, "Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!" He was encouraging young novelists to soak up the seemingly mundane details. And I'm left wondering what this might mean to a house full of pastors, teachers and Christian leaders - what it means to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.

I'd like to think that this Masters of Divinity degree I'm wading through is not just a hoop to jump through - just a formality of education or a religious institutional system. I'd like to think that every paper, every test, every reading assignment is not just an assignment but a challenge to my soul to be more like Jesus.

I'd like to think that I'm studying more than just than what I'm told, and that I'm absorbing all the details around me - that I'm studying my brothers and sisters around me, learning what makes you laugh and cry, what makes you tick, where your story has brought you so far, what YHWH has done for you and how that gives me a more complete of who He is.

I'd like to think that this seminary education teaches me less about what to study but rather how to study once I graduate and move on from this season. If I am here for nothing more than a piece of paper that says I graduated from Asbury Theological Seminary, then I am missing the point. The thing is, I love to study. I love to know stuff and to fill my head with stuff. But if it doesn't change me, if it doesn't make me love God more and make me more like Jesus, than its a waste of my time. If a seminary degree doesn't make me love God more and be more like Jesus, than its a waste of my time.

A life of study is not a life of knowledge, but rather about a life of transformation.

Lord, make us a house of study.