A few summers in my teens/early 20s I drove a ski boat at a Christian conference center on the Delaware River between Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The vast majority of the people I drove came for tubing rides, but every now and then there were people that wanted to waterski.
If they were experienced waterskiers, it wasn’t a problem. They knew what to do, I knew how to drive for it, and it usually worked out pretty well.
On the other hand, it was much more difficult when beginners gave it a shot. We had a limited selection of ski sizes, so if the skier was small/light, they usually struggled to get into a good starting position. Just wrestling with the skis while trying to stay in the right “crouched” position was usually enough to get both the skier and the driver frustrated. Add to this the fact that their teacher…me…had never been successful at waterskiing, and it’s no surprise that I can probably count on one hand the number of people that were able to ski for the first time under my tutelage over the course of two or three summers. Sometimes it’s true what they say: those that can’t do…teach.
If you want to learn something from someone, you’d expect your instructor…regardless of what they’re instructing…to be proficient at it, wouldn’t you? I grew up near that conference center and since I was a kid I’d hung out by the river and heard lots of different boat drivers describe to beginners how to get up and out of the water on waterskis. The problem was that I didn’t have any experience doing it myself, so it was very difficult for me to successfully translate that theoretical knowledge into something usable for someone else.
In the Christian life we’re supposed to devote ourselves to passionately pursuing Christ. In the twelfth chapter of the book of Mark, someone asked Jesus what the greatest commandment is. He responded in verse 30 “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul and all your strength.” Pursue Christ with everything you’ve got, but while you’re doing it, make sure that the sources you’re learning from, getting excited by, gaining encouragement from, and using to be renewed are credible sources. Some of the enemy’s greatest weapons employ half-truths or sound like they’re religious, but are in fact more misleading and damaging than flat-out lies.
The voices you’re listening to…are they walking the walk, or only talking the talk?