What I know, and don’t

In my past–and this is not something I’m proud of, by the way–I have been very good at being a religious Christian. As a teenager, I was seen as a spiritual leader among my peers, who often would call me up for counsel on various matters. (Of course, because I loved the attention, and because by nature I am good at encouraging people, I figured I must know what I’m talking about if these people think enough of me to seek out my advice.)

In reality, I did have a lot of knowledge about the Bible and the church–surface knowledge, anyway. I could out-Bible-quiz most people my age, and I always won the be-the-first-to-look-up-the-Bible-verse contests in Sunday school. And I also had a very high moral standard (which I publicly upheld, but privately failed at quite often). All this actually made me a fairly judgmental person, and the sick irony is that in many circles, even among the church youth, this was an admirable trait. My peers were fearful of me, but they also held me in a kind of awe, like this is the kind of Christian everyone ought to be. They didn’t want me to know how often they failed to live by the moral codes. (If they only knew how often I failed at them, too.)

When I went to Oral Roberts University in the mid-1980’s, I was suddenly around a lot of other young people who were also leaders in their respective circles; and that was a really good experience for me, because rubbing up against some of them actually shone the light on some of my unfair judgmental attitudes, and helped to temper me. But most of us in that protective Christian bubble that was ORU still took a measure of pride in what we knew. My wife (whom I met at ORU) admits freely that by the time she left campus, she had an attitude going to church services that said, “Tell me something I don’t know; I dare you.”

Growing up in the church culture, I have spent most of my life believing I knew the score, that I knew how God was and how God acted and how God felt about certain things. But looking back, I think most of what I “knew” was a system that worked for me. The institutional church is a system; theology is a system. I had been around those systems long enough that I knew the “rules”, I knew how to get by. I knew how to act humble, even when I wasn’t. I knew how to be popular in church circles, and I was good at it.

Then God did something very, very rude to me. He rocked my world. (The nerve.)

When God called my family out of the church we were serving in to begin a new church in (gasp!) Tulsa, we had no idea what we were in for. God gave us Isa. 43:18-19 as our foundation Scripture: “Do not earnestly remember the former things, or ponder the things of the past. Behold I am doing a new thing; now it will spring forth; will you not perceive it?”

I look at that Scripture now and laugh at how naive we were. We were so arrogant that we thought we knew what the “new thing” was, and we thought we were called to bring it to Tulsa! We did not know that God was setting us on a journey for the next eight years that would essentially un-do all that we thought we knew about God, the church, and worship. This journey, pieces of which I will share on this blog, essentially destroyed the religious foundations on which I had been basing my life–all that I thought I knew–and I’m now living on what is left. God has stripped me to the foundation, and is rebuilding. And that’s an imporant point: the foundation that was laid in me (Christ) is a good foundation. God did not get rid of that. He just wiped away, or rather burned away, all the messed-up stuff I’d built on top of that good foundation.

Early in life, I lived as though I had more answers than questions. Nowadays, I have more questions than answers. My calling card is no longer “Jeff McQuilkin, Expert on matters of worship and spirituality.” Instead it reads something like, “I know nothing, and most of what I thought I knew was bunk.” It isn’t very ego-building, but it is very freeing. I am free now to learn the real Jesus and to walk with Him in a way I never could before.