Doubles tennis was the only sport I played in high school. After practicing for awhile you get a pretty good feel of the court’s dimensions, both on your side and on the far side. There were times I hit the ball from deep on my side and knew right away it was headed out of bounds and all I could do was hope the guy on the other side went for it. Other times it hit the wrong part of my racket and it was easy to tell it wasn’t even going to make it over the net.
After hitting around a good bit, you start to get a feel for how big your own side of the court is, too. You figure out where to stand when you’re playing baseline, when you’re playing net, and also when you’re on the forehand or backhand side of the court. You don’t want to venture too far toward the middle; straying from the edges left you vulnerable to an opponent blasting a well-placed shot down the side, right past you.
At one of our home matches, we had been playing our opponents long enough to get a feel for their style of play. They weren’t super precise in hitting the ball right on the line, and they didn’t often put a whole lot of zing on their shots. In this particular instance I was playing the baseline while my partner stayed up near the net.
One of the players on the opposite team lobbed a shot up high, over my partner’s head, and it was coming for the baseline. I backed up, growing increasingly confident that even though it would be close, it was going to land out of bounds. As it sailed increasingly deeper, I decided in my mind “yep, it’s going long.”
Of course, you don’t receive the point until it lands out of bounds, so I waited for it to come down from its ballistic trajectory. It picked up speed as it got closer, and I reached out my hand to catch it on the bounce back up. Sadly for me, my judgment proved to be fallible that day. The ball landed in the green (in bounds), but I had already made up my mind to catch the ball rather than play it. In a complete goober move, I watched the ball land in bounds, take a bounce, and then I caught it on the way back up, uttering an audible “awwwww!”
I had decided in my mind I was going to be right. By the time I recognized I was wrong, it was too late for me to do anything different. There are so many lessons like that in the Bible; you can read scripture, interpret it one way, then find out your interpretation wasn’t correct. In Jesus’ day, everybody looking forward to the Messiah’s arrival expected Him to be a conquering hero King who came to set His people free from oppression. Yes, that part is still to come, but the possibility that He’d show up two different times didn’t even occur to people. When some guy born to a poor family, who lived his life as a commoner, claimed to be the Messiah, I understand why so many people gave Him the brush-off. They took their eye off the ball, though. He fulfilled all the prophecies about where the Messiah would be born, how He’d die, and a variety of others. Just because they had made up their mind about what “right” looked like didn’t mean they had a complete understanding of how God had decided to write the script.
Another example of landing on the wrong interpretation: “God won’t give you more than you can handle” sounds very biblical, but Scripture never actually promises that. It comes from a distorted version of 1 Corinthians 10:13, which is about temptation, not suffering in general. I know Christians who have been overwhelmed and in over their heads multiple times. Paul actually describes being burdened “beyond our ability to endure” in 2 Corinthians 1:8-9, and says that experience taught them to rely on God rather than themselves. That’s the true takeaway: if you’re going to grow in the Lord and you’re not willingly relying on Him, He’ll arrange it so you unwillingly rely on him.
One more. Matthew 7:1 says “Do not judge.” If you take it literally, it sounds like you’re never supposed to make judgments about another person’s behavior. You have to take it in context though; a few verses later Jesus talks about removing the plank from your own eye so that you can see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye (Matt 7:5). The warning is against hypocritical/self-righteous judgment, not discernment itself. On the contrary; we’re to liberally use the brains and discernment God gave us. Compare “Do not judge” with John 7:24: “judge with right judgment.” Absolutely we’re to judge acceptable behavior from unacceptable, but that has no bearing on whether or not someone’s worthy of love and an attempt to reach them with the Gospel.
There are plenty more examples, but we’ll stop here. The point is that you shouldn’t make up your mind so firmly that you’re stuck being inflexible when God teaches you something new. The Bible’s big. We’ll probably need to read certain things a few times before really understanding them. Be open to the idea that God knows better than you do, but is willing to teach if you’re willing to learn.
