Where Did You Learn That?

How much do you remember from what you’ve been taught, be it school or life in general?   Would you like to test your knowledge?  Okay, here goes.  Write down your answers to the following questions.  When you get to the end, you can see if you get a passing grade.

 

 

1.     What are diamonds made from? 
2.     What percentage of our brains do we use?
3.     Who invented the light bulb? 
4.     Cleopatra’s famous heritage?
5.     Who invented the printing press?

Now for your grade:  1. If you wrote Diamonds are made from compressed coal, you are 100% wrong.  The carbon that makes diamonds comes from melting of rocks from the Earths upper mantle; coal is produced from plant material.  2.  If you answered that we only use ten percent of our brain, you are also wrong. Over the course of a day, most people use all parts of their brain.  3.  Edison did not invent the light bulb! Actually, historians list up to 22 invntors of the incandescent lamp before Thomas Edison, starting with Sir Humphry Davy in the early 19th Century.  4.  Cleopatra was the beautiful, charismatic queen of Egypt and the wife of Julius Caesar, but she was not Egyptian!  She was actually of macedonian Greek Heritage, daughter of Ptolemy XII.  5.  If you’re doing poorly, certainly you’ll get this last one correct.   If you answered Gutenberg, you are not alone in being wrong.  So you will base your knowledge on the truth, print technology originated in China in 593 AD, and the Chinese were printing from movable type in 1040 AD.

If you answered based on what you had been taught, or felt were commonly held facts, and still failed, please don’t fret.  What I am really interested in is this: Where did we learn these “truths?”  

 

Wherever or from whomever we learned them, we learned them well.  And once learned, these “truths” become incorporated into our life operating system (our philosophy, both socially and culturally) by which we live and act. 

 

Most of us realize that what we learn has consequences both beneficial and harmful.  This is because what we learn guides us; and like a tram on a rail, it’s hard to make a u-turn!

 

Practice perfect, right?  Wrong! Practice makes not perfect but permanent.  If you an idea reinforced over and over again it doesn’t get perfected, it becomes permanent.  But, what happens if what we learned, no matter how seemingly authentic and commonly believed, was wrong in the first place.  What if we’ve placed into our psyche misguided lesson we’ve learned?

 

Some misguided lessons are innocent and have little effect on life; there are others which do. What about the misguided lessons we’ve learned about the Christian faith?  What if there are lessons about faith and practice we’ve learn very well that are actually wrong.  Then, like other such “learnings” we’ve incorporated them into our Christian operating system (theology) which guide us like a tram on a rail too!


We all bring “lessons” and “learning’s” into our faith.  However, some of what we’ve learned has no basis in Judeo-Christian biblical faith.  This Sunday, we will begin a sermon series, “Where did we learn that?”  In the coming weeks, we will examine some commonly misguiding lessons we’ve learned about the Christian faith.  The goal behind our exploration is to become more authentic and more fulfilled through our faith.   This week we will look at our worship of God in community.