Then, midway through the festival, Jesus went up to the Temple and began to teach. The people were surprised when they heard him. “How does he know so much when he hasn’t been trained?” they asked. (John 7:14-15)
Read: Proverbs 5:1 – 7:27
Relate:
What good is a college education? What is the point behind the tens of thousands of dollars we drop annually into a piece of paper that will sit on a frame on an office wall for the rest of time? Why do we spend a decade trying to pay off a downloading of knowledge that has long since proven itself of very little worth?
I think college is good for two things: First, it points our learning in the right direction. The learning and education is up to us. We need to earn it for ourselves and getting a PhD from an Ivy League school is of no greater worth than graduating from Hamburger University if it isn’t put to good effect. A good professor or teacher will direct your learning and provide a foundation a lifetime can build on. They won’t just spit out facts they expect you to be able to regurgitate on a test a few weeks later.
Also, college is a place for a person to build relationships with others who will be working in the same field and who are working together in the process of learning both their education and life lessons. I would say 90% of what I learned during my college years I learned through interaction with other students and during my internships. It did not happen in the classroom but rather in the chapel or the student union. It happened in the dorms and the dining halls. My book learning truly took off once I had already graduated.
React: Education through interaction. That was Jesus’ training as well. He didn’t sit at the feet of one of the great Rabbis. He didn’t get His education or His understanding of the Father through the rigorous memorization and recitation program that was so prevalent in His day. No, He simply spent time with the Father. Lots of time. They say it takes ten thousand hours of intentional time spent on a thing to become an expert. That is twenty hours a week, fifty weeks a year, for a decade. I think it would be fairly safe to say that Jesus was an expert at least twice over by this point in His life. The question is, how much time am I spending with the Father? In what other, pointless things, am I well on my way to becoming an expert?
Respond:
God, I long to be an expert in You. Help me to narrow my interests. All too often I find myself flitting from one pointless thing to another going nowhere in my life and doing nothing with my time. Help me to be intentional. Help me to be focused. Help me to live in the discipline of spending time, and more of it, with You daily. I need You. And those I know and interact with need me to share the education of that can only be acquired through interaction with You.
THE RIVER WALK 
Amen, Please Lord, give us time, good learning and healing time with You!
Keep pointing us all upward my friend,
and thanks
One of the things I find sad is when churches will not even consider allowing a young man to be a guest preacher if he didn’t graduate from a Bible college. I know a young man who has been given the opportunity to preach since he was 15 years old, went to Bible college for one year, and is taking some teens through a discipleship class, yet a pastor from another church would not consider him because he has not graduated from Bible school/seminary. An elderly lady, a matriarch in our church, whose own grandsons graduated from Bible college and are youth pastors, once said after hearing this young man preach, “He is a really good preacher. I don’t think a person has to go to Bible college to be a good preacher. The Lord has obviously given him the gift of preaching and teaching.”
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i hear what your saying about college and formal training. It is not a necessity to have it to be used by God, but it is to be acknowledged in our culture. We know the disciples were most likely those rejected by the rabbi’s “colleges” of Jesus day, and yet they were chosen to carry the most precious information in the world to the world. What qualifies us in God’s eyes is a universe away from what we need to be qualified by the world. The world values college and school and education, and it is a valuable thing. Even though a lot of your learning didn’t happen in the “classes” per say they happened in that environment , the overall atmosphere of higher learning. I went to college later in life, so i was able to recognize the changes that happened in me as i learned. Education changes our brains, which is the real educating that happens. it introduces us to people and places, and ideas that otherwise we might not be privy to. we do know Jesus stayed behind to sit with the rabbi’s in the temple and was exposed to their interactions. I love learning and i love that we are created in the image of God who created us with the ability to grow and learn, but not with the dependence upon it for his love , gifts and promotion. I think the bottom line is God doesn’t need us to be ‘educated’ to use us in his kingdom, but isn’t it wonderful to have the opportunities and potential to be educated. there is something to be said for higher learning.
but also a lot to be said for those God raises up. The world may never except the Moses’, and Peter’s of the day, and that’s why they are the ones God does exceptional things through…perhaps.
Amen. Love is a choice. Just as in marriage, we must choose to love God every day, in sickness and in health, until death and beyond into eternity. This concept reminds me of my life-verse, Psalm 73:26-26:
“In heaven you are all that I have, and on this earth, you are all that I want. My mind and my body may fail, but you are my strength and my choice forever.”
Peace and Blessings,
Abigail Joy Wieser