Learning About God

When we study God's Word and think through what living a Christian life means, it's important to think about who God is and how he relates to people. Often it's easy to take a passage of Scripture and only think about what that means for what we should do. That's fine to do at some point, but it's important to be sure we take time to think about what it means about God and how he relates to us.

If we never study or think about God's power and strength, and how he uses it to help us, it might be much harder to cast our anxieties and burdens on Christ (Psalm 55:22 and 1 Peter 5:7, ESV). Knowing about God's power helps us to be able to respond to God's call.

If we never study God's mercy and gentleness to his people, including us, then we might find it hard to be merciful and gentle to others and ourselves out of love.

If we never study God's pure holiness and goodness, we might not realize how extremely blessed we are to even get a chance to talk to him.

Some people worry that a lot of theology isn't practical, but how we view God and how he relates to us definitely affects the way we live. We should also of course see what the Bible has to say about humans too.

While learning the attributes of God is of great importance, it's more important to see God as he interacts in history—how the Christian God is a personal God. Read more on this in Danny's article "God Known through Actions."

Danny also wrote about how theology speaks to all areas of life in "Theology as a Meta-Discipline."