Rule 3: Avoid the Gotcha! Perspective

Soon after my conversation to Christ, one of the youth pastors of the church I was attending preached a sermon whose provocative and funny (to me anyway) title has stuck with me over the years. He titled it, “Flesh Finders and Sin Sniffers.” As you might guess, the pastor was referring to church members, usually older, who spent an inordinate amount of time attempting to gauge and then report on the spiritual temperature of any and all attendees to anyone who would listen. They were the in person human equivalent of today’s online click bait. The dread of every pastor. For those of us who came to Christ during the Jesus movement of the 70’s, we brought a lot of baggage with us. We were easy targets.

How does this apply to teaching our children to think critically? We want them to learn to think critically, not be critical or judgmental. Joel Miller put it this way, “Read to learn, not to refute.” 

Miller quotes Maximus the Confessor who said at the start of his Four Hundred Chapters on Love:

If someone reads this or any other book whatever not for the sake of spiritual profit but to hunt for phrases to reproach the author so that he might then set himself up in his own opinion as wiser than he, such a person will never receive any profit of any kind.

Teach your children to avoid the Gotcha! perspective or attitude when reading something new. Instead, teach them read with the intent of learning something new, or at least understanding a perspective other than their own. It starts with us.

Thanks for reading!

Curt Bumcrot, MRE

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