God’s School of Life

"So that thou incline thine ear unto wisdom, and apply thine heart to understanding; yea, if thou criest after knowledge, and liftest up thy voice for understanding; if thou seekest her as silver, and searchest for her as for hid treasures; then shalt thou understand the fear of the Lord, and find the knowledge of God.

For the Lord giveth wisdom: out of His mouth cometh knowledge and understanding. He layeth up sound wisdom for the righteous ... and preserveth the way of His saints" Prov. 2:2-8 KJV

Our great Creator hides Himself, so that men will have to search beyond their natural understanding, go further than the visible things easy to comprehend, to know Him. We are all in God’s school of life, designed to teach us and train us to comprehend His wisdom, knowledge and understanding. We are to seek this above all, for in Him are the paths of life. He alone knows the best way to live in this world.

There is a God-place within each of us, longing to be filled with His nature, though we oft seek other ways to fill this hunger and thirst for the divine. But we can and do seek Him, because He wants to be found, to Father us into the kingdom of His dear Son.

"Seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after Him, and find Him, though He be not far from everyone of us: for in Him we live, and move, and have our being" Acts 17:27-28 KJV

What we see depends on where we live. The environment around us teaches us what is reality here in the world. God teaches what is reality in His kingdom of righteousness, peace, and joy so that He becomes our reality, where we truly live. The more we search for God, learning to draw from the spirit, beginning to understand His nature, focusing upon the world of His spirit, the more we are able to live in the higher realm of God-consciousness.

The Lord has given us life, and this life is a training ground to become more and more like our heavenly Father.

“When your judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness." Isaiah 26:9 NKJV

We need His judgments to teach us the right way to live, to be righteous in what we say and do. His judgments first begin in our earth as we seek to know Him in this school of right living. Think back to when you were in school—which is a long time ago for some of us! If we learned to love learning, if we were supported in our educational growth, we grew to understand the things of this world we need to know to do well.

When being educated, information and knowledge compiled by others, was taught to us according to our age of understanding. We asked questions to comprehend what was being taught and took tests to show what we’d learned. Some subjects were favorites, while others did not catch our interest, but we had to learn them anyway. God’s school is like that, with our lessons becoming more difficult as we walk along with Him. These more challenging lessons deal with who we are, our very character and nature, so that we live more and more as He would have us do.

As we yield to the Lord, we become eager learners, wanting His wisdom and understanding as we handle all that comes our way in this world. He teaches us the foundations of faith, the essential truths upon which to build a good and productive life. Jesus had a thirst to know His Father and asked many questions of the leaders of His time even when He was just twelve. His parents had gone to Jerusalem for the annual Passover feast and traveled a day before they realized He was not with them.

“After three days they found Him in the temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. Everyone who heard Him was amazed at His understanding and His answers. When His parents saw Him, they were astonished. His mother said to Him, ‘Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you.’

‘Why were you searching for me?’ He asked. ‘Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?’” Luke 2: 41-49 NIV

Jesus wanted to know the things of His Father’s house. He was eager to learn and knew the Father’s house was where He had to be. As He grew, He gained more knowledge and understanding until He reached the Jewish age of majority, thirty years old, when His ministry began. We know little of those years, but we can be sure He continued to hunger and thirst to know His father’s ways and was learning about all things pertaining to the kingdom.

We also continue to grow and mature as we hunger and thirst to know our Father’s ways. Our reward is not a report card, public acclaim, or necessarily a public ministry, but the peaceable fruit of righteousness that is worth more than gold and silver. There are many rewards given in God’s school, but only God and ourselves know about it until the fruit of His dealings are made visible when He is seen within us. We have many quiet victories as we learn from Him and, like any good parent, Father God celebrates every one of them!

God’s lessons do become more difficult than we had anticipated when we fell in love with our Savior. His purpose is to build our character to be like Him, to love others and treat them as want to be treated. Salvation is free, but there is much to understand, endless wisdom to gain, a vast universe Father God wants to teach us about as He shows us His ways. When we don’t know His ways, His truth, we ask!

"If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you." James 1:5 NIV

Our natural education in the world’s educational systems may have taught us a great deal, but may not have changed our natures to become mature in Him. We know that some humans are very intelligent in academic matters, including religious matters, even achieving the acclaim of others but know little of how to allow God to change their very character. Many of the world’s highly intelligent people are woefully lacking in how to live with others and this does not qualify us as godly.

Having a degree or two, letters after our names, does not mean that we have been in God’s school unless we let Him teach us also along the way. God is the life force within us able to filter out His truth from man’s wisdom and knowledge. There are many things to learn about the Lord in all walks of life if we desire to do so, whether others know they are teaching us His lessons or not.

God’s school of life teaches us about Him and how He would have us be in this world. It is the only way for us to truly become the light of this world as we need to be. Consider the rewards in Psalm 91 for those who learn to live, move, and have our being in Him, who seek to say and do only what the Father says and does, like Jesus Christ, the firstborn Son.

“He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the LORD, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust.

Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence. He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler.

Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday. A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee. Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked.

Because thou hast made the LORD, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation; there shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling. For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone.

Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder: the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet. Because he hath set his love upon me, therefore will I deliver him: I will set him on high, because he hath known my name [nature].

He shall call upon me, and I will answer him: I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him, and honour him. With long life will I satisfy him, and shew him my [full] salvation.” Psalms 91 KJV

To dwell with God, to love the Lord above all others, brings many rewards. Again, where we live on a daily basis is what we see as reality. The more we live in God and He makes His dwelling place more fully in us, the more we see of Him. Our lives are protected, guided, made safe and secure, as Psalms 91 so beautifully promises. This is His secret place, found as we search for Him with all of our hearts.

In His secret place, nothing can harm us. He takes fear of harm and death from our consciousness as He teaches us of His ways. Like in any school, we ask questions about things we do not understand and we have tests [trials] to prove our faith. We fall short in understanding many matters because His ways are higher than our ways, His thoughts higher than ours.

To have the name of God is far beyond just calling ourselves Christians! Name means nature, and the nature of God in man takes a lifetime of education and training for those of us called and dedicated to His purposes in the earth. We are to be like Him, displaying His love and mercy for all, His redemptive justice giving hope to the downtrodden and those who have lost their way. He will have such a people, that is His plan.

Some of us always have a list of questions we are asking of the Lord and many are answered as we walk with Him and talk with Him. Indubitably, there are also questions He will only answer on the other side of this life, or they will no longer matter. We wonder about the meaning of the words He used, the writings of those whom He has given wisdom and knowledge for the rest of us, and His school of life is endlessly fascinating and rewarding!

We must love the Lord with our whole heart, all of our mind, strength, and will, to learn of His ways. His school is ongoing and there is no graduation in sight! It is an extreme privilege and pleasure to continue to learn of Him. He has always been after the hearts of men, and is not satisfied with passive lip service, like rote answers in classroom. There are students who excel at this and get top grades, but may forget what they learned once the test is passed. Not so in God’s school:

“And so the Lord says, ‘These people say they are mine. They honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. And their worship of me is nothing but man-made rules learned by rote.’” Isaiah 29:13 NLT

As committed Christians who desire to know His nature, we long to dwell or stay in the secret place within us where our Lord has taken up residence. This requires much more than knowledge of scriptures, great revelation, or the do’s and don’ts of religion. We are not following systems or rituals, but our Living Father God. He made man for relationship with Him, to be like Him. It’s the heart He is after and that is what is desperately wicked and cannot be changed but by our Master Teacher.

Daily we take up our cross, those things that crucify our fleshly ways, our carnal understandings and reactions, our soul life. He puts these things to death, creating in us a willing and tender heart wherein He writes His truth. When something is written in our hearts, it is permanent! And Father God never forgets us or what He is doing in us. Some trials meant to crucify our flesh are deep and painful, such as the death of someone for whom we prayed diligently, the unexpected harm that comes to those we love, the loss of business or friendship or a hoped for future.

Other lessons are lighter, even missed as opportunities for God to give us a character change. Sometimes we feel like we have overcome much, leaping over mountains with Him. At other times, we realize we have only overcome a small mole hill and think we are most victorious in it! We are not to measure ourselves, such a hard thing for some of us, but allow God to do so. His measurement is the fullness of the stature of Jesus Christ fully within our being. He has set teachers among us as we are equipped to reach maturity:

“And it was He who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for works of ministry and to build up the body of Christ, until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God, as we mature to the full measure of the stature of Christ.

Then we will no longer be infants, tossed about by the waves and carried around by every wind of teaching and by the clever cunning of men in their deceitful scheming.

Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into Christ Himself, who is the head. From Him the whole body, fitted and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love through the work of each individual part.

Jesus Christ our Lord and King is the only One Who passed all of life’s tests and graduated into the place reserved for Him by the Father. He is our example, guide, and teacher, One who lived what He spoke. When we are the teachers, we must recall that God’s love is first patient, then kind when the daily imperfections of others and the way this life goes for us deeply challenge us. It is easy, it is natural to yield to impatience, irritation, unkindness if not rudeness, when these things happen.

When we do, we miss many lesson in God’s school that He will have to test us on again. It’s our nature that is being changed, not our head of knowledge in any area. God’s school is the only education that will bring us to maturity. He will have a people for His name’s sake, with the very nature of our King! God wants all people to come to know Him. The Jews were the chosen people in ancient days, and through the gospel of Jesus Christ, the gentiles—that is, all people—are God’s people.

Peter confirmed this in the discussion with James about what should be required of Gentiles coming into the faith:

“Now, there coming to be much questioning, rising, Peter said to them, ‘Men! Brethren! You are versed in the fact that from the days at the beginning God chooses among you, that ‘through my mouth the nations are to hear the word of the evangel and believe.’ And God, the Knower of hearts, testifies to them, giving the holy spirit according as to us also, and in nothing discriminates between us and them, cleansing their hearts by faith…

[James replied]’Simon unfolds how God first visits the nations, to obtain out of them a people for His name.’” Acts 15:8-9;14 CLV

Throughout the word of God, He does many, many things for His name’s sake, in spite of what His own people have represented as His nature (His name). He has taken a people who are to be known by His nature. He longs to have a people who will show forth Who He really is: a God of love, compassion, and mercy, ever faithful, ever just, revealing love to all.

Father God is dedicated to our training in His school of life so that others can really know what He is like, no longer shadowed and distorted by our own character. Here’s but one of many scriptures that declare this truth. We do not get what we deserve because God knows we cannot change ourselves to be like Him, to really know His ways. We need God and His training to learn the lessons to be like Him in this world. This He does for His name:

“Therefore tell the house of Israel that this is what the Lord GOD says: It is not for your sake that I will act, O house of Israel, but for My holy name, which you profaned among the nations to which you went.” Ezekiel 36:22 KJV

This is where we are heading in the great Day of the Lord which is upon us. We are to be like Him, perfected by the trials and tribulations of this life, just as Jesus was. These are not somehow sent outside of God’s permission, but created and designed by Him to perfect a people for His name’s sake. Presently, Jesus Christ is the only Graduate of God’s school of life, passing every test.

We wait for our maturity in Him, though it be ages before the fullness of His plan is seem and known. We are promised many things in the kingdom, particularly for those of us committing to go all the way in God, on this side of life and following death of the physical body.

“Thus said Yahweh: Let not the wise boast himself in his wisdom, Nor let the mighty boast himself in his might, Let not the rich boast himself in his riches,

But--in this let the boaster boast himself, In understanding and knowing Me, For I [am] Yahweh, doing kindness, judgment, and righteousness, in the earth, for in these I have delighted.” Jeremiah 9:23 KJV

We are destined to be a delight to our Lord Jesus Christ and to our wonderful Father God. What could be better than that?