The Plumbline

  To learn, you must love discipline;  it is stupid to hate correction. (Proverbs 12:1) As a student in school, we received grades or 'marks'. Those papers were returned with positive 'scores' or some negative ones depending on how the teacher noted your work. The goal of a positive grade was to give credit where credit was due. The goal of any negative grade was always to encourage the student to do better the next time. In other words, to correct what was done wrong, learning from it as you did. Those grades were a bit of 'discipline' designed to get us 'motivated' to do better. When God corrects us, he isn't trying to point out what we did wrong. He is attempting to get us to see we can do better if we embrace what he is trying to teach us. The teacher in the classroom doesn't want the student to fail. The teacher wants the student to learn to love the lesson and get something out of it they can use throughout their life's journey. Why wou...

Life Hack #12: It amazes me how many individuals actually think they are learning something when they just attend church on Sunday, issuing proclamations of agreement and head nods in assent to the teaching, or even watch Christian TV all through the week, and still don't manifest a life change. Exposure to a subject and even agreement with it is not learning - but God holds us accountable for the knowledge we possess, even when we don't use it. Exposure to a subject gives us knowledge of the subject - application of the knowledge gives us the chance to be affected by it.  Give yourselves to disciplined instruction; open your ears to tested knowledge. (Proverbs 23:12) We need to "give ourselves" to disciplined instruction. We actually have to put something into our learning, but we all have experienced the difficulty associated with actually learning. The first thing we must remember is that the attitude we exhibit when truth is made available to us and how well...