I am at a place in life where it is super easy to look back and see faults in my early Bible teachers. As a child, I was taught to honor them, which I certainly don't regret, but...
The 'buts' are coming rapidly these days. It may have been that my teachers believed that they needed to dumb down the Bible so kids could understand it, or it may have been that they were themselves fairly clueless, and I will even concede that possibly, (on very rare occasions, of course,) I may not have been fully listening, but...
But the fact of the matter is that I fell victim to a lot of lopsided Bible teaching. I try to be more "Berean" about things now. cf Act 17:11
For one, I was taught that it was more important to be polite than it is to be courageous. As nice as that seems in the moment, that idea ultimately is corrosive to faith.
I remember the days of teaching the story of Joshua to my own children. "Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous! Do not tremble or be dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go." Joshua 1:9
It was still abstract for me. Joshua the Super Hero might be able to decide that he would not tremble, but me? Nope. My early childhood teachers never even hinted that this was a command that we could choose to obey. Kids need to be told that while they are still little. Later, by youth-group age, I was taught that we could choose to do the courageous thing, but was never told that it could be done without dismay.
The no-trembling and the no-dismay are also choices, and those choices are not contingent upon "feeling" that God is with us. The key that no one ever bothered to hand me was that faith for 'God being there' was/is a boost to not being demoralized. So I learned a lot about the hard parts, but not so much about where the faith to achieve them would come from. I never learned how to appropriate the confident faith of being tremble-free in any childhood Sunday school. Sometimes it was held out as a mystic goal, (if God chooses,) but there was never much fruit to show for it.
If we are wanting to use a Gospel pattern of agricultural metaphor, then my early church experiences were big on watering; (Oh yeah, and they were good at dampening spirits of rambunctious children too,) but Oops! somebody forgot to plant the seeds! I do not remember anyone ever intentionally planting God's vision for me, in me. I can see a few sporadic times that happened, but those were "accidental" mercies, and it is unlikely that the people who spoke into my life even knew that God was using them.
This fall, I went through the video lessons and workbook, Anointed, Transformed, Redeemed. It is a study of three seasons in the life of King David. It was good. Detailed. Rich in insight and practical application. Even encouraging. But the way I remember the "anointed" part dealt far more on how Jesse & Company's flesh-based reasoning discounted David as being "just a youth out in the sheep pasture," and how we must use spiritual eyes to see as God sees. That is a good lesson, to be sure, but it glossed over what David's finding his calling as Samuel spoke it over him did to David and how it altered (or maybe supplemented) his world view. Being anointed by Samuel changed David.
Here is the way one eBook described it:
David had been anointed by the prophet Samuel when he was a boy. God placed in David the image of a king. He knew who he was. He knew what he was called to do. That’s why, when the rest of Israel saw an enemy, a giant, David saw an opportunity. David was confident of victory because he was confident in his covenant with God. He had God’s profile deep in his heart. He had the profile of an anointed king. Slaying Goliath was just a matter of doing what was already inside him. He acted out that profile by faith… and his covenant with God did the rest. (Copeland)"Just a matter of doing what was already in side him!" Can I miss something that never was? If so, I miss not having a Samuel speaking over me. Most of what I know about what is inside me I have just stumbled upon in conversations with God. Consequently, I didn't really know how to transfer knowledge of a life mission to my own children. I did better than my parents, but the original baseline was so abysmally low that even that is not saying much.
I have come to believe that "choosing" a career is the wrong mindset for Christians who wish to be effective and satisfied during their life on Earth. We should spend more time discovering what God has placed in us, and then walk that out by faith.
And yes, I know that the Lord does not characteristically give us the big plan all at once. The biblical pattern is "from faith to faith," one step of faith at a time. cf Romans 1:17. But we could be doing a lot more to teach children how to hear God because today's children are going to need an ark. The life raft that I got from my childhood training isn't going to be seaworthy in the storms of today.
Footnotes:Shirer, P., Moore, B., Arthur, K. Anointed, Transformed, Redeemed: A study of David. Nashville, TN: LifeWay Press, 2008.
Copeland, K. Do You Fit the Profile of a Prosperous Believer? Fort Worth, TX: Eagle Mountain Church. p. 3.
