Shaped Like Jesus--October 21, 2025

Shaped Like Jesus--October 21, 2025

"But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have known sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the person of God may be proficient, equipped for every good work." (2 Timothy 3:14-17)

The perpetual complaint of schoolchildren goes something like this: "But we'll never have to USE this stuff in REAL life!" 

I bet you have heard it before, whether from the mouths of your own children or grandchildren, students you have known, or out of your own mouth. They don't know why they must learn what seem to them merely random facts or obscure trivia just for a test, only to forget them and never use them again for the rest of their lives.  State capitals, the periodic table, Mohs Scale of Mineral Hardness, or whatever else they are being tested on, it all gets lumped in with "stuff we'll never use in real life" in the minds of a lot of kids.  And in fairness, I'm sure there are plenty of things I was taught in school that I could have gotten by in life never really needing to know.  I still know the ten lines from Macbeth I had to memorize in 12th Grade English, but it has never helped me in a direct practical sense with raising my kids, doing my job, or paying my bills.  I remember a smattering of 9th Grade Geometry or 8th Grade Algebra, but typically I only realize I still know it when my kids have homework that forces me to dust off the old polynomial skills while they now ask ME, "When will I ever need this in life?"

Now we might quibble, between one generation to the next, about what information is really needed to get by in life.  After all, math that I had to learn to do by hand my kids are used to doing on a computer, or with the assistance of AI... and things that I learned with the help of a calculator were things that a previous generation had to use a slide rule in order to calculate.  Knowledge that I think is important might be dismissed by the generation to come, and practices I had to work hard at learning might well become obsolete with the next technological revolution (card catalogs, anyone?).  But that said, I have a certain sympathy for those who ask the question, "Why do we need to know this?"  And I do believe that just memorizing facts for the sake of filling our brain with them misses the point of real learning.  Somewhere along the way, a great many of us slipped into thinking that the point of education was just to do well on a test... so that we could get a good grade... so that we could get hired for a better job... so that we could make more money.  But I think there is something deeper we may have lost, and which we may need to recover, about the real purpose of learning: formation.  We learn in order to be formed as people in a certain way--to be shaped both with particular skills and specific knowledge, but also with a certain character and way of seeing the world.

I think that's also true for why we read the Scriptures, too.  If we have forgotten that the Scriptures themselves are not an endpoint, but rather a means by which God shapes us into the likeness of Christ, we are at risk of turning the Bible into mere trivia to be memorized for "the test" and then forgotten.  But the New Testament writers themselves, like this passage from Second Timothy that many of us heard in worship this past Sunday, don't make that mistake.  They know that the Scriptures are meant to do something to us: they are not merely textbooks meant to be gleaned for head-knowledge. They are a tool by which God still shapes us, like a woodworker with chisels, rasps, and sandpaper.

That's something we might not have noticed in this passage at first.  I have heard these verses trotted out plenty of times over the years when Respectable Religious People have wanted to build a case for the infallibility or the inerrancy of the Bible, since this is one of the few places where a Biblical writer actually speaks about "the scriptures" and uses the language of being "inspired" (the Greek is even lovelier, meaning literally more like, "God-breathed"). And I'm not here to belittle the Bible or cast aspersions on the Bible's authority.  But the thing I notice here in the actual passage from 2 Timothy is that the writer doesn't just talk about scripture as a source of facts to be stored in the brain, but as a tool for training... us.  Scripture is inspired, yes, and useful, yes, but for what purpose?  "For training in righteousness (or "justice" would be just as accurate a translation)," and to be "equipped for every good work."   In other words, the Scriptures are given to form us into becoming a certain kind of people, who act in certain kinds of ways, who love in the particular way of Jesus, and who see the world (and all people in it) from a Jesus-shaped point of view.  The Bible, in other words, isn't a subject we can ever "master" like you can memorize the list of US presidents or the world's tallest mountains, but rather something through which God makes us into new creations.  The Bible isn't so much an end-point in and of itself, so much as it always points us to Christ and forms us to be more like Christ.  Any version of Christianity that merely uses the Bible as a repository of facts to be memorized or as a weapon to attack people with, rather than as a means by which Christ comes to us and transforms us in his likeness has missed the point.  The Bible isn't here just to be memorized in our heads, shouted at others we don't like, or used to justify our own agendas.  Rather, the Scriptures have been given to us so that we love the way Jesus loves, see people as neighbors the way Jesus sees, and serve the way Jesus serves.  The list of dates you had to memorize in history class might not make a difference in the way you live you life today.  But the God of the Scriptures is intent on forming us into a new kind of people by shaping us in the Story they tell.

There is wisdom, in other words, in that meme you see floating around the internet these days that says, "Don't go around with a mouth full of Bible verses and a heart full of hate."  That may seem a bit blunt, but it's a fair point.  The Bible will do something to us, because God has not only breathed out these ancient texts with which we wrestle, inspiring poets, prophets, and storytellers to write their experiences with God, but also because God continues to work through those words and stories to make us like Jesus, as well as to ground us in the truth that we are beloved by Jesus, too.  But none of that is mere head knowledge, and none of that will leave us the way we were.  I can memorize the periodic table of elements and still be a rude, selfish jerk to other people.  The Scriptures, by contrast, intend to make a new creation out of me, by forming the love of Christ in me.  I can't walk away from engaging the Scriptures and be the same--like Jacob, I may find myself both blessed by the encounter and also walking with a limp.  So if we have told ourselves that the point of the Bible is to give us the essential facts we need to memorize so that we can get into heaven, I think we may have missed the boat.  Rather, these verses from Second Timothy see the Scriptures as one more way God makes us more and more fully shaped like Jesus--so that we are trained to do justice in the world, and so that we are equipped to do good to neighbor, stranger, and enemy, just like Jesus.  

That's the goal, in other words: not that we would become people who know certain facts about God, but that we would become people in whom Christ's presence is ever clearer, in the ways we love, the ways we speak, the ways we serve, and the ways we lay down our lives.

I have spent a great deal of my life already doing a lot of reading of Bible stories, books, commentaries, and translations. And I do not think that time has been a waste, not for a moment.  But I am not interested in being merely a head that knows Bible facts.  I hope that, when my time on earth is done and I breathe my last, people don't say of me, "That guy knew a lot of Bible verses," but rather, "God brought forth Christ-like love through him--I bet some of that came from the influence of the Scriptures."  In the end, we aren't going to be masters of Bible knowledge, but that was never really the point.  God's desire with all of us is that the time we spent studying, reading, reflecting, and wrestling with the Scriptures will form us to be more fully in the likeness of the One who is the Word Made Flesh, Jesus himself.

Lord God, shape us by the Scriptures and the Story to make us love like Jesus.