Loving The Material More

Ari admitted it to himself on a Tuesday, in the car, and then sat with the engine off for a while.

He loves the subject more than he loves the people he teaches it to.

Not in a small way. Not in the way everybody would confess to if pressed. He knows the difference between the two loves from the inside, and one of them is thirty years deep and the other one is a duty he performs well.

He noticed because of a question. A woman had asked him something at the end of a session, and it was not a good question. It came from a misunderstanding, and answering it properly would have taken twelve minutes and cost him the last of the evening.

And what he felt, in the half second before he arranged his face, was irritation that she had put her small confusion in front of something so beautiful.

That is the sentence he sat in the car with. In front of something so beautiful.

He answered her well. He always does. She left grateful and she was right to be, because the answer was correct and kind and he gave her the twelve minutes.

But he knows what he felt first.

You may have your own Tuesday. Somebody asked you something ordinary about a thing you have given your life to, and the first thing that rose in you was not love for them.

Now. There is a way of handling this that ruins good teachers, and it is to decide the subject is the problem and love it less.

That is not the instruction anywhere. And there is a verse that puts the two things in one sentence without asking you to give up either.

Knowledge puffs up. Charity builds

The sentence is in 1 Corinthians and it is very short, and it is aimed at people who were factually correct.

Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth.1 Corinthians 8:1

Read what it does not say. It does not say knowledge is bad. It does not say the people who knew more were wrong about the meat, and in fact the chapter goes on to agree with them on the facts.

It says knowledge has an effect, and love has an effect, and the effects are different. One inflates. One builds.

Edifieth is a building word. It is bricks. It means somebody is more solid than they were before you spoke.

Which means the test of a teaching session is not whether the material was accurate. It is whether a person walked out more structurally sound.

And you can hold both without losing either. The written word puts knowledge and charity in one sentence and never once tells the Corinthians to know less, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my argument who lets a man sitting in a car at dusk see that he has been offered a repair rather than an amputation.

And nothing in that verse asks you to love the subject less. The word corrects the effect and not the possession, and the Spirit is the one who supplies the charity that was missing rather than confiscating the knowledge that was not.

The thing you love is not the rival

Here is where Ari has been wrong for a while, and it is worth naming carefully.

He has assumed the two loves are competing for the same space. That the amount he has for the subject is subtracted from the amount available for the room.

But look at the verse again. Charity edifies. It builds. And what does a teacher build with?

The material.

The thirty year love is the timber. Without it, he has nothing to hand anybody, and the sessions become warm, encouraging and empty, which is its own way of failing a room.

So the woman with the poor question was never in competition with the beautiful thing. She was the person the beautiful thing was for. He had the two of them facing each other, and they were meant to be facing the same direction.

And what you love was always meant to be spent on people. The word calls the gift given for the perfecting of the saints, and the Spirit is the one who makes the plain sense of a purpose clause bear weight in a man who thought his love had to be rationed.

And you have not disqualified yourself by feeling it. The word says God is greater than our heart and knoweth all things, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit that a half second of irritation, honestly seen, is closer to repair than thirty years of never noticing.

Nobody is asking you to become shallow

I want that put down hard, because this is where a message like this goes wrong.

The correction here is direction and never dilution. The gift is real, the depth is real, the thirty years are not a mistake, and a teacher who responds to this by knowing less has not become loving. He has become less useful, which is not humility.

Scholarship is not the enemy of a room. Bad aim is.

And the phrase puffeth up is not a synonym for learned. Paul was learned. It is about inflation, air, a thing that grows without becoming stronger, and the cure for air is not less structure. It is weight, and weight in that sentence is love.

Keep every hour. Turn it.

And you are able to aim it. The word never separates the knowing from the loving, and the Spirit is the one who supplies the charity that a person cannot manufacture by trying harder on a Tuesday.