Familiarity with the things of God will cause you to lose your awe. You’ve spend so much time in Scripture that the grand redemptive narrative, with its expansive wisdom, doesn’t excite you anymore. You’ve spent so much time exegeting the atonement that you stand at the foot of the cross with little weeping and scant rejoicing. You’ve spent so much time discipling others that you are no longer amazed at the reality of having been chosen to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. You’ve spent so much time unpacking the theology of Scripture that you’ve forgotten the end game of personal holiness. You’ve spent so much time in strategic local church ministry planning that you’ve lost your wonder at the sovereign Planner who guides your every moment.

 
He spoke matter-of-factly, probably not understanding the significance of his words, but I couldn’t get them out of my head. He was the head of a national ministry. We were in a meeting talking about ministry partnership. I was sharing my excitement over what I saw happening in the church around the world, and he said, “I don’t think anything excites me anymore.” It wasn’t my place to respond, but I immediately thought, You better be excited, you are leading a ministry, and if you can’t get your excitement back, maybe you shouldn’t be doing what you’re doing. He had lost his excitement, left only with duty to do the repetitive business of ministry day after day. What a sad and dangerous place to be!

Perhaps it begins in seminary with the up-close examination of faith. Perhaps there is a moment when the glory of God just doesn’t seem all that glorious anymore. Perhaps living in the middle of a theological community begins to dull my excitement and numb my amazement. Perhaps the Bible gets reduced to little more than a theological manual. Perhaps even God himself becomes more an object of study than the Lord of glory.

Perhaps it is all about the dynamic of familiarity. The great Princeton Seminary theologian B. B. Warfield told his students in 1911:

“We are frequently told, indeed, that the great danger of the theological student lies precisely in his constant contact with divine things. They may come to seem common to him because they are customary. As the average man breathes the air and basks in the sunshine without ever a thought that it is God in his goodness who makes his sun to rise on him, though he is evil, and sends rain to him, though he is unjust; so you may come to handle even the furniture of the sanctuary with never a thought above the gross earthly materials of which it is made. The words which tell you of God’s terrible majesty or of his glorious goodness may come to be mere words to you – Hebrew and Greek words, with etymologies, inflections and connections in sentences. The reasonings which establish to you the mysteries of his saving activities may come to be to you mere logical paradigms, with premises and conclusions, fitly framed, no doubt, and triumphantly cogent, but with no further significance to you than their formal logical conclusiveness. God’s stately steppings in his redemptive processes may become to you a mere series of facts of history, curiously interplaying to the production of social and religious conditions and pointing mayhap to an issue which we may shrewdly conjecture: but much like other facts occurring in time and space which may come to your notice. It is your great danger.

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