I usually don’t like it when God teaches me a lesson. I think I’m one of those people who doesn’t usually get it the ‘easy way’. Or at least that’s not been the trend in my walk with the Lord. I don’t know, maybe it’s my personality or maybe when I’m on my death bed looking back at my life I’ll see it as one big grand lesson truly proving my point.

Regardless, reading in Proverbs yesterday, I came across this verse which shed some light on my tendency.

Proverbs 29:19:

“By mere words a servant is not disciplined,
   for though he understands, he will not respond.”

When the Lord is leading me through something especially difficult, at some point I usually think to myself, “why can’t he just say it? why’s it have to be this big complicated scheme.

Well, I suppose he has. And I don’t usually listen. Hence the verse in Proverbs. Good thing someone’s looking out for us!

It was over four years ago now. Although it seems much longer. I was leading a small group of high school guys. And, of those guys, I was teaching a smaller, more intensive discipleship group.

The discipleship crew would meet once a week and study the Word. I would come each week with a handout to guide our discussions. They would usually be in question-answer format and would also serve as my own notes. Today, one of the guys from that group asked me if he could get copies of those handouts to give to one of his friend’s who is a new Christian.

The question made me a little nervous at first. When I started the small group and discipleship group I was only beginning to explore the more intricate parts of Christian theology; In retrospect, I’m not sure I was a good person to do the job I was doing. So the idea of giving handouts from that time could potentially be quite humbling—and no one likes that (Okay, 95% kidding)!

But, I wasn’t about to be that defensive about my ego. So I obliged and I decided print them out for him. As I’ve been doing so, what I’ve found has been surprising.

When my pursuit of theological understanding finally brought me to questions of destiny and predestiny and of course the larger questions of Calvinism—I fought hard against the argument. I was raised believing staunchly in the absolute free-will of man. Although not on the basis of any spiritual authority, but simply on a kind of that’s-the-way-things-are way. Some of the basic claims of Calvinism cast serious doubt on those ideas.

You see, when I became a Christian, I wasn’t discipled much into anything; no specific doctrinal position—except the discipline to read the bible. So that’s what I did, I read the bible. What I apparently didn’t realize was that  the foundational teachings of Calvinism were being laid in my mind all by themselves—just from reading the bible.

Today, as I’m going back through and reading these handouts, I’m realizing that my thoughts at this time were already Calvinistic in nature. No one had taught me, no one had explained it to me. In fact, my religious upbringing would probably call these claims heretical. Yet, simply searching scripture on my own brought me to what I would later understand as “Calvinism”.

I find that to be pretty fascinating. It bolsters my confidence in the Word of God being able to teach a reader the truth all on its own. That’s pretty cool, I think.