One summer a teenager was desperate to get a job. After looking his town over, he had turned up nothing. Then he heard of a farmer who had a small farm a few miles out of town. He went out to see the old farmer about some work, and the farmer agreed to hire him for the summer. The teenager showed up the next morning, and the farmer gave him a milk pail and a stool and told him to go to the barn and milk the cow. The teenager had never milked a cow before but figured it couldn’t be too difficult. Over an hour later he returned to the house. He was dirty, perspiring profusely, and had half a pail of milk. The old farmer asked, “How did it go?” The boy said, “Well, extracting the milk was easy. The hard part was trying to get the cow to sit on that stool.”
Mark Twain said that we are all ignorant. We are just ignorant on different subjects.
In the beginning of Baptist work in our country, the greatest Baptist growth occurred on the frontier. Many of our Baptist forebears, coming out of this background, disdained education and felt that the less you knew the more spiritual you were.
E. Y. Mullins taught theology at Southern Seminary for many years. He would often go to speak at associational meetings held in small churches in rural areas. On one occasion he preached on the importance of education. Afterward a man said to him, “The way you talk, it sounds like God can’t use an ignorant preacher.” Dr. Mullins responded, “My brother, sure He can. That’s the only kind He has. We are all ignorant, just in varying degrees. But He can’t use our ignorance. He uses what we know, and the more you know the more He can use you.”
Several minutes after that conversation, this man was asked to pray. His prayer went something like this: “Lord, I thank you for my ignorance, and I pray that you will make me ignoranter and ignoranter.” Dr. Mullins later told some friends about the prayer the man prayed, and then he added, “That is one prayer I believe God answered before it was ever prayed.”
The fact of the matter is that all of us need to learn a lot more than we currently know. Studying the Bible and exploring the ways of God are tasks for a lifetime. We can never get comfortable with our current level of knowledge or understanding. We have to continue to make progress.
Paul wrote the Philippians about some people who felt that they had attained perfection in their Christian lives. Paul certainly did not feel that way about his own life. He told of his desire to come to know Christ better so that he would become like Him. Then he added, “Not that I have already obtained all this or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me” (Philip. 3:12-13). May God help us to press on toward that mark in our lives as well!
