The School of Life

“These things happened to them as examples….”

I Corinthians 10:11

When it comes to learning the lessons of life, like many other things, there are the easy ways to learn and the hard ways to learn. Every lesson doesn’t have to be learned through suffering, heartache and failure. And contrary to the popular notion, experience is not always the best teacher. No doubt, life has many lessons to teach all of us, lessons about people and our interactions with them, lessons about the moral choices we face and the accompanying consequences, and lessons about our serving a God whose ways and thoughts are so much higher than ours that faith and trust are essential ingredients to success. But where will we learn them?

Learning in the classroom is far and away the best option; it is the educational equivalent to pain free dentistry, if such a thing really exists. Sitting in my office typing this note, I’m looking at several hundred books in front of me, the products of much research and study, of life experiences recorded in book form that we might benefit from the wisdom they contain. On my desk is my Bible, an inexhaustible source of wisdom and understanding meant to guide us throughout our lives. In it, we can read of those who’ve gone before us; we can learn about a God who is faithful to His promises and whose Word is a sure foundation to guide our lives.

But the classroom environment is not our only source of learning. We can learn from the lives of those around us, as long as we are honest in looking at the end of the matter and not viewing temporary success through rose colored glasses. Ruined lives, lives filled with sadness and disappointment, through choices that can only be classified as “they should have known better,” are invaluable opportunities for us to learn without experiencing the weight of failure in our own lives. And learning from others includes seeing those who have placed their fate in the hands of a loving God and earned the reward of their trust.

The last ways we learn has been mentioned already; we learn through our mistakes and through the pain we experience in life. No doubt about it, we learn lessons through suffering that no classroom is able to teach but those lessons should be the exception, not the norm. Our first order of business is to spend time in God’s Word, the most incredible self-contained classroom ever imagined. Read about the men and women who’ve gone before us and learn from them. And with that as a foundation, we can read books and read people’s lives and be someone who, no matter how old we are, never stops learning in the classroom of life.

God Bless
Pastor Joe
Gateway Church