by A.W. Tozer

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. Matthew 11:29

When we become Christians we enter the school of Christ. We come under the direct tutelage of the Holy Spirit and should move normally upward by stages toward spiritual perfection. But the truth is most of us do not.

When the children of Israel came out of Egypt they became students in God’s school of experience, but they were slow to learn and sometimes they did not learn at all or forgot at critical moments all that they had learned. The Old Testament is helpful reading, not because of any worthy qualities it reveals about Israel but because in it we see the great kindness and long-suffering of God toward a dull and wrongheaded people who managed to go through school without learning anything.

Because Israel could not or would not learn from experience they were at various times defeated, oppressed, dispossessed, and at last they were rejected outright and dispersed throughout the world. The presence of Jews in every corner of the world is a witness to this.

That Israel should have learned and did not is no proof that they were more obtuse than the rest of us; it proves rather that they were very much like us. Instead of smugly condemning a nation for its folly we had better consider ourselves lest we also fall. For the record of the church is no better than that of Israel. Before the last book of the New Testament had been finished the church had started through the same cycle of learning and forgetting, rising and falling, sinning and repenting that had marked Israel in earlier times. And after the passing of 1,900 years we are still at it.

by A.W. Tozer