“Everything relates to Seinfeld.” A running joke in our household and among friends for years, the 90’s sit-com addresses many human concerns. In one episode entitled “The Keys”[1] Kramer is disgusted with George saying, “You’re wasting your life!” George—ever paranoid, ever defensive—gives one pathetic response after another to Kramer’s harangue that he has no reason to get up in the morning.[2] Later, as Kramer considers his own purpose for being, he asks George, “Do you yearn?” George, unable to fathom the concept, replies with hesitation, “Well, not recently.” A moment’s pause prompts a final, feeble attempt to define yearning: “But I crave.”
In a culture obsessed by the physical, craving replaces yearning. As a high school teacher it was my wish to create in students a yearn to learn. Yet how many times did I hear the infamous, “How will I use this?!” Plagued by consumerism, we in The West have misused the practical, creating pragmatism. No longer content to pursue a coherent framework of knowledge, degrees are instead keys, unlocking more fiscal rewards. Unfortunately, like George, the idea of desire is reduced to lust. Harry R. Lewis, former dean of Harvard College, lamented the educational state of affairs as Excellence Without a Soul.[3]
Hebrews set the standard, using the word for “soul” as equivalent to yearning. “My soul yearns for you in the night; in the morning my spirit longs for you.”[4] The soul can be hungry or thirsty.[5] Some satiate satisfaction with appetite, craving what they lack.[6] Ecclesiastes says folks fill the void with more emptiness, others “with good things.”[7] “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God.”[8] Loving God with the whole of one’s life (“heart, soul, strength,” Deuteronomy 6:5) is singular devotion, one’s desire. But what is it that prompts our longing to love God?
Jonathan Edwards in a sermon entitled “The Importance and Advantage of a Thorough Knowledge of Divine Truth”[9] explains,
So there can be no love without knowledge. It is not according to the nature of the human soul, to love an object which is entirely unknown. The heart cannot be set upon an object of which there is no idea in the understanding. The reasons which induce the soul to love, must first be understood, before they can have a reasonable influence on the heart. God hath given us the Bible . . . there can be no spiritual knowledge of that of which there is not first a rational knowledge.
Solomon was right: “It is not good to have zeal (Hebrew “soul”) without knowledge.”[10] It seems that yearning, a longing for God, one’s desire “indeed is the desire to know, for we are known, and into this we grow.”[11] Eugene Peterson calls knowing God ascetical theology. “No wonder there is such lavish attention given throughout Scripture to the properties and conditions of our humanity—our bodily parts, our emotional states, our physical circumstances, our mental processes, our geographical settings. Every human detail is part of this instrumentality of response to God.”[12]
My daughter Chelsea, completing her undergraduate degree in May, told me on the phone this past weekend, “I’ve just now learned how to be a student.” She is in exactly the right frame of mind to live a whole Christian life. Edwards contends that knowing about God and His world is the “daily business” of all Christians, “their high calling,” benefiting the soul.[13] “Hard work and discipline should be needed for this,” maintains Evelyn Underhill. In a chapter entitled “The Preparation of a Mystic” she contends that knowledge development will entail, “the training of a layer of your consciousness which has lain fallow in the past.”[14] The so-called “spiritual disciplines” need biblical knowledge to prompt desire for loving God in everything.
Many of my students at Crossroads Bible College work 40 hour-a-week jobs. They add classes to their already busy family and vocational lives. When I ask them why they do it their simple reply is, “I want to know the Bible better.” Unlike George, here are believers that know yearning is a desire for Our Father, knowing His Son, attained through The Spirit’s discipline, by reading The Book.
Mark believes that because his students yearn, there is even more delight to “bring it” every class hour at Crossroads Bible College.
[1] Seinfeld, Season 3, Episode 23, first aired 6 May 1992.
[2] It is how Jason Alexander (George) delivers the lines that has me chuckling again even as I type. It is one of many not-to-be-missed Seinfeld scenes.
[3] Harry R. Lewis. 2006. Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education. (Perseus Books Group).
[4] Isaiah 26:8-9; Psalm 119:20.
[5] Psalm 107:9; Proverbs 19:15; 25:25; 27:7.
[6] Isaiah 56:11; 58:10; Jeremiah 50:19.
[7] Ecclesiastes 2:24; 4:8; 6:2, 3, 7, 9; 7:28.
[8] Psalm 42:1. Longing for God’s courts (Ps 84:3), the law (Ps 119:20), salvation (Ps 119:81), and The Lord Himself (Ps 130:5; Lam 3:25).
[9] Quoted in Douglas Sloan, The Great Awakening and American Education. (Teacher’s College, 1973): 197-211.
[10] Proverbs 19:2.
[11] Sebastian Moore as quoted by James Houston, The Heart’s Desire: A Guide to Personal Fulfillment. (Lion, 1992): 27.
[12] Eugene H. Peterson. 1994, 1997. Subversive Spirituality. (Reprint, Eerdmans): 80-83.
[13] Ibid., 204, 211.
[14] Evelyn Underhill. 1915, 2000. Practical Mysticism. (Reprint, Dover): 15.