The Rail Yard

            I once heard a story about a little boy who was sitting in a rail yard waiting for his train to leave. As he was watching the sights, he noticed an old man walking through the rail yard with a metal rod and he was tapping each of the wheels on each of the train cars three times as he passed. The boy had quite a long wait so he watched as the man worked his way across the yard tapping every wheel three times without missing one. Eventually the old man passed by the window of the train car that held the little boy, and he couldn’t contain himself.

            “Hey, mister” the little boy called, “Why do you tap every one of them train wheels three times?”

            The old man paused for a moment as if he had never been asked that question and replied, “You know, son - I really don’t remember – but I never miss a wheel.”

            I believe that anyone who desires to grow in life needs to be confident enough in God and the perfection of His plan, that they are always willing to re-assess their long-held beliefs. I have seen without a doubt, in my years in the Church that one of the biggest idols we face is our own religious dogma. We have spent centuries majoring in the minors. While this has caused a fracturing in the Church, which is bad, it has also clearly illustrated that part of the process of the Church becoming like Jesus is the need to be constantly aware that some of the things you have believed for years may be a lie.

            Let me give you this example from my own life. When I first became a Christian, I pushed more than a few people away because (this is what I convinced myself of, anyway) I just could not contain my zeal for Jesus. At the time I just wrote all those rejections off, telling myself that they were just arrogant and prideful and I used bible verses like this one to prove it to myself:

Matthew 7:14 (ESV)

¹⁴ For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.

I often used the Bible to justify my overzealous and unloving witness. Sometimes when I had pushed away another family member with my ridiculousness (that I swore was from the mouth of God) I’d pull out this one:

Luke 14:26 (ESV)

“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple."

This would help me explain to myself, in some way (although looking back, it was not a very believable way), why my mother wanted nothing to do with me or my amazing newfound religion, and why my father wouldn’t even come see his own family in Church for twenty years. Yes – my folks were wrong to behave that way too, however I had sinned grievously in my insensitive behavior toward them, and all I did was show how little I really understood the love of God or the word of God at the time.

            Through that, and many other similar mistakes over the years, I have learned that as we grow we should strive to be constantly aware of how our understanding of the Bible lines up with both the personality and the entire counsel of God as we understand it at that point in our lives, rather than our natural tendency to use a few cherry-picked verses just to win an argument. I've learned that sometimes we want to win more than we want to be right, or at least I do.

            I believe Christians owe it to themselves and frankly, to the ones God left us here for, to listen to many different Bible teachers, should we be blessed enough to live in an area where we can do so. In today’s world – that is pretty much anywhere there is internet access. We should be willing to be honest with ourselves, and pray to grow wise enough to change our views when God reveals an area in our lives where we may have grown in our understanding, or grown into a whole different viewpoint that we were unaware even existed until that precious moment in time when God revealed His truth to us.

Don’t trust in the way you’ve always done it – trust in God and His continuous work in your life right where you are today - not where you were five years ago. A faith that is unwilling to constantly grow and re-examine itself is really just a scared, weak, timid and shallow faith that does not really trust Jesus – it trusts in a set of beliefs. Some of us don’t have any idea why we believe what we believe – we just know it’s what that guy said from the pulpit Sunday morning – so it must be right. Or we know that’s what my daddy believed and my daddy’s daddy before him – so it must be right. Or that's what I've heard in church my whole life - so it must be right. Be careful, friends - that type of mindset can make you just like that old man. Clanking away – never missing a wheel – but also never leaving the rail yard.