If you’ve been on the internet at all in the last 10 years, then you know that we are surrounded by experts. Experts on everything. One person says eat these foods to live forever. While someone else says eating those same foods will LITERALLY kill you. If the team that lost the game had only done XYZ they would’ve won the game. From raising your kids, to medical advice, to a litany of life hacks it seems like far too many people are ready, willing, and able to tell you how to live your life.
Even in the church, a place where even if we have the same theology and trust in the same God, we can look at another body of believers and list off all the ways they are “doing it wrong” in our eyes. As something of an expert myself, I would like to join the rabble and offer my own authoritative solution.
What if we just let God be God? God’s been doing it longer and has more experience. What if we look to the way others do things (within orthodoxy of course) with hopeful expectation that we have the opportunity to learn something.
Paul in 1 Corinthians 3:18-19 puts it this way, 18 Do not deceive yourselves. If any of you think you are wise by the standards of this age, you should become “fools” so that you may become wise. 19 For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight. As it is written: “He catches the wise in their craftiness.”
When we crown ourselves the experts on absolutely everything, we are telling the world, “I have nothing left to learn.” There is a phenomenon called the “trained incapacity of experts” wherein highly skilled individuals in a specific field become unable to think creatively or adapt to new situations due to their deep-rooted training and expertise.
God is doing new things around us all the time, if we have the eyes to see them. God is the expert. God is the authority. What would happen if you settled into place as the student?