Show Your Work

By Mike Glenn

Photo by Rishi on Unsplash

According to my algebra teachers, getting the right answer isn’t enough. On every test, not only did you have to solve for X, but you had to write down every step of the process that got you to your answer. I actually had points taken away when I arrived at the right answer because there was a flaw in my work. How can you lose points if you have the right answer?

According to one of my teachers, just because I was good at guessing didn’t mean I was learning algebra. Not only did I have to get to the right answer, I had to get to the right answer the right way.

Too many of us live our lives like children going down to the front of the church for the children’s sermon. No matter what the children’s pastor talked about, we knew the answer would be Jesus. Because we thought we always knew the answer, we never took the time to do the work. We never worked out our theology or theological framework, we knew the answer was Jesus and that was good enough for us.

Like my algebra teacher told me, just because you come up with the right answer doesn’t mean you’ve learned algebra. Likewise, just because we know the answer is Jesus doesn’t mean we know the faith.

Here’s how it goes for most of us; we encounter Jesus at some point in our lives and we get baptized. Life couldn’t be better, Jesus loves us and we love Jesus. We start reading the Bible, but we don’t study the Bible. We look for bumper sticker quotes from the Bible that we memorize quickly and quote and misquote in appropriate moments. “All things work together…” “I can do all things through Christ…”

We never take the time to think through our faith, nor do we do the hard theological and philosophical work required to build the framework of our faith. We never think hard about who God is and how He has revealed Himself to us. We never write out our understanding of humanity, sin, creation, love, grace, church, mission, ministry…well, you get the point. We graze through the Scriptures, picking up morsels of truth here and there, but we never take the time to put the whole picture together. If we learn any theology at all, we learn it piece by piece without ever seeing the whole picture. We take life as it comes. If we’re having a hard time with one thing, we focus on that. When we start having to deal with something else, we think about that. We live piece by piece, but never understand the whole picture.

And then life happens. We have to make a decision about what to do with life support for a parent. Is this our decision to make? What if we believe only God can give life and therefore, only God can take life? How do we live this out in a moment when machines can keep our loved one alive indefinitely? Have we thought about that?

Have we thought through wealth and what it means to be wealthy? How much do we really need and how much should we give away? What does money mean in our life and how much of our life are we willing to give to earn money?

These are hard and real questions real people have to face every day. If we’re ready, if we’ve thought through our first principles and implications of our choices, we can make wise and good decisions. If we’re not ready, life will ambush us in a tornado of choices forced on us in a crisis. Decisions we’ll have to make without time to think them through.

Jesus told a story about two men who built houses. One built his house on the rock and the other on the sand. The storms came and blew against both houses. One house stood, the other house crumbled. According to Jesus' story, the only differences in the houses were where the houses were built – one on a rock and the other on sand. The very first decision – where to build the house – is the decision that determined if the house would survive the storm.

And the storms come. They always do and right now, we’re deciding whether or not we’ll survive those storms. How we think right now determines what we will know when the storms come. So, do the work. Show your work. Getting the process right is as important as getting the answer right. Algebra and Christianity are like that.