From a theology standpoint, I think the challenge we we face is
there's the writing in the text that's out there that these systems learn from.
There's both a combination of really good theology,
very solid exegesis, and very poor theology.
And a system like ChatGPT doesn't have an opinion about what is right or wrong.
And so it's going to learn from all of these.
and, and.
Maybe even in a very slight sense, begin to include those ideas
in sermon preparation.
Which.
Is not what you want, but may come in in a nuanced way.
And so. We just,
we have to know where these, where our information comes from.
Welcome to this episode with Anabaptist Perspectives.
Joined by Ben Harris, to explore questions around AI and studying.
Ben, would you want to just.
Yeah, give us a brief introduction to yourself before we jump in.
Sure.
Good morning. Marlin. Good to be with you. so.
My name is Ben Harris.
I'm a professor at Sattler College up in Boston, Massachusetts.
I run the business program up here, but my background goes through the world
of engineering and artificial intelligence and machine learning.
so I've spent.
More than a decade in the tech sector, before jumping into academia.
So now I'm a teacher full time. But.
I do my best to keep fingers in the, the technical world.
Things that are developing, especially with AI turning out the way it is.
Yeah.
And we may get a chance to talk about
some of the technical stuff, but we're actually focusing a little more
on the teacher side or study side of things for this episode.
so maybe to jump into this issue with,
you know, thinking about AI and studying.
imagine a scenario.
I think I heard you bring it up in another podcast, but you've got,
go to church Sunday morning.
Preacher seems to have a smooth sermon.
Points are good.
You know, he's got some cultural background.
He can even talk about a few original language words.
And then you'll learn.
Oh, turns out all the key points came from asking
copilot or ChatGPT or somebody like that.
to generate an outline.
what's wrong with this scenario?
Or why does something feel off
in a scenario like that?
So in a in a statement or two, I'd say it's
because we have gaps in our understanding of where that information comes from.
We have to think about
how these these tools, as new as they are, how they're how they're built,
how they learn effectively, how they're what they're trained on.
I was listening to, just a podcast the other day in Tech World, and,
the podcast host noticed his reputation in the world of,
artificial intelligence was not very good.
And so he set out to repair it, and it was able to within a day or two,
change how a systems like ChatGPT or others.
Thought of him.
and I said, oh, well, that's good for him.
But if our.
If our hope in something like sermon preparation or study,
relies on,
on precision exegesis and illumination of the scriptures, and we're missing
we're missing the layers in which we're getting our information
to present to a congregation that I think that's where we start to feel.
I'm not so sure about this.
Because it, We don't get to see all the intermediate steps.
We don't know how ChatGPT develops.
it's it's outputs.
You can get wildly different outputs with very slight changes
in, in the prompts of the questions that you ask.
And so, there's a
I don't want
to over, I don't want to use the term black box glibly.
But it, There's definitely black box behavior going on here.
So it leads to just like, it should lead us to questions, to curiosity.
You don't know what's going on inside the black box where it's coming from.
So how did he change his reputation?
Just update his own website and put new language on there
about himself that ChatGPT picked up, or what?
You hit it right on the head.
That's exactly what he did.
He went in the background of his website, and, he had spoken with some
AI researchers and said, how can I improve this?
And they gave him these little blips of code
that he inserted into the back of his website
that the the engines would then pick up on and change his perspective.
From a,
from a theology standpoint, I think the challenge we we face is
there's the writing in the text that's out there that these systems learn from.
There's both a combination of really good theology,
very solid exegesis, and very poor theology.
And a system like ChatGPT doesn't have an opinion about what is right or wrong.
And so it's going to learn from all of these.
and, and.
Maybe even in a very slight sense, begin to include those ideas
in sermon preparation.
Which.
Is not what you want, but may come in in a nuanced way.
And so. We just we we.
Have to know where these where information comes from.
Yeah.
I mean, that reminds me some of the stuff I was playing with. Just,
you know, asking one of these engines about,
another organization, where I work, and it just
it picked up, you know, the stuff we had in our website.
Stuff on our statement. Fed it back to us.
And there wasn't a lot of other information out there they could pick up,
as a search engine.
and then,
you know, that organization is connected to, to Christian missions.
And so I start just asking it questions and so on.
And yeah, it starts picking up the stuff that.
You know,
kind of the missiology circles that we might be familiar with starts
picking up that lingo and spitting it back, even though it doesn't have
obviously, it doesn't have any of those,
convictions.
It just brings us to another.
Another.
I guess limitation of all this is that. You know, any.
Any of these systems
are limited by what we're calling the indexed web.
essentially anything a search engine can access.
So it has to be indexed for Google, but Google can at any time de-index something.
So something won't show up in its search results.
And they do that all the time.
They do it with Offensive or hate or violent speech.
They don't want it to show up in their search results.
So, you know, any company is able to do this.
Anything that is an arbiter of web traffic can exclude things,
and then those things will no longer show up in an LLM’s learning.
archetype.
It just won't learn anything from it. So.
You know, it's. Not that.
We treat these LLMs as compendiums of truth.
And they are far from it, right?
They they can only get what they find.
So, given that
and just to push into the sermon thing a little bit, is there a proper place
for using one of these large language models?
In that context,
sermon or devotional at church or anything like that?
I’d say, there is there, we, I'm.
Comfortable using it for really what it's good.
For, right?
These LMS take a huge amount of text, and they they're trained to develop
writing styles that are effective and clear and succinct.
And so.
You know, if, if I've sort.
Of transcribed a good bit of a sermon down and I'd like ChatGPT to help me.
Like.
Clean it up a bit, ask any, any questions of me about the sermon.
it can.
ChatGPT can play the role of a congregant.
Who might have. Questions.
and that's the end.
But then it's my responsibility to ensure that the.
The sermon and, and the.
Information that gets preached is still accurate.
So I've not asked ChatGPT to have a theological opinion or view.
I've asked it to simulate and test me as a, as a teacher.
And I think that's a. Good, a good use of it.
That doesn't.
That doesn't ring foul of using something.
Inappropriately.
It's your way of putting it
in its place as a tool.
Which was my final question.
We will move on from sermons to lots of other areas of life here in a bit. But,
you know, I remember
especially when I was young,
somebody would have, a devotional or something.
It'd be a topic
and they'd say, this, this topic or this word is talked about,
you know, this place, and they'd list through
five places in the Scripture or ten or whatever.
And I remember,
I don't know if I asked my dad how people get this or what,
but very young, I remember him
saying, well, they used a concordance, and that's how they found the list.
Obviously we got more powerful tools than the Strong's Concordance,
which was a big paper book, that somebody pulled out for prep.
but how different is this?
Is it different in principle, or is it just we're dealing
with a more sophisticated tool or less sophisticated tool as it may be.
I’d say something like Strongs, And I have an affection for Strong's Concordance.
Because I have two of them on my shelf in my office, at.
My home, and, but they, you know, from.
From an LLM perspective, the the data that's contained in something like
a concordance is just is one data point that gets added and trained into.
The model.
So we use it as a, you.
Know, our. In our linear thinking processes.
We use it to sort of trace a word through Scripture and find meaning and nuance.
an LLM Will take it very.
Differently.
Right.
It'll, it'll in input that information.
and it, it won't it can't.
It doesn't know the intent of the reader. Right.
So it an LLM doesn't, you know, if you're looking for the word faith
throughout the scriptures, an LLM can't, can't intuit exactly
where you're going, the connections that the Holy Spirit's illuminating in you.
It'll just give you a sort of a
I don't want to say
word vomit, but it'll just it'll explode data
in front of you without making connections because it's not smart enough.
Right. It it is trained on what it knows.
and it'll.
Give you what it thinks is correct.
But it's a probabilistic guess.
That's the.
Best these things can do.
Is they they take a.
They say, what's the most likely correct answer?
You just give.
That and then it and then it moves on.
I don't know, word vomit.
Doesn't sound like too bad of a term.
Sometimes I can resonate with that,
depending what the examples are.
Yeah. Okay.
Let's think about more broadly, you know, this question
of, of study and
how do we value study there?
We talked about, you know, sermons or devotionals.
obviously you're an educator.
We'll get to a classroom context.
but maybe first just yeah, help us think about that more broadly.
Going to work. Family,
being the congregant,
listening to the sermon, whatever.
yeah. Realm of study.
So I think that. AI has really.
There's a temptation here.
In that our, Artificial
intelligence systems, way back in their genesis,
were constructed to simulate how the human brain actually works and functions.
What we know about the networks that that our minds are created of.
And the temptation, I think I would I would phrase it this way, is
to outsource the responsibility to train and to think correctly.
Right?
Because when we're
when we're studying, when we go in and we do the difficult labor,
that's what study is. It should be laborious.
If you're finding something challenging, you're actually probably learning.
and that's a good thing. We should be comfortable with that.
But what it's doing is it's you're it's training connections in your.
Brain to more. Easily allow.
Literal.
Electricity to flow between synapses in the mind.
And so that's a, that is a physical analog
to exactly what ChatGPT does in the background of ChatGPT.
The architecture has a, a network construction, and it's training itself
to, to discern right from wrong, just like your brain would.
So I think we would we would never want to educate or instruct
our children to just outsource
the responsibility to think correctly and clearly to something else.
We'd never want to give that away.
And but the.
Temptation for us as adults is to say, well,
you know, because the the study is difficult.
Right? I want to I want to.
I'll just have ChatGPT do it and it probably starts very small.
Right. It starts in little examples.
but we.
I think our charge as Christians is to be on guard against doing this right.
Because when it, you know, when our when our witness
is called to the test in evangelism or another context,
we may not have ChatGPT there to lean on as a crutch, right?
Our, our. Actual trained mind is now.
You know, on on test.
And how are we going to to do with what's in front of us?
Yeah.
And I like how you highlighted that. There.
You know, if we’re educating our fourth graders.
And we don't teach them how to work through
the math problems or how to understand things in mathematics.
And we say, hey, just look up the answer,
okay?
We know there's a problem there, right?
But I hear you saying, well, for adults it's more of a temptation
to think we can skip the study because we got that in
in fourth grade or we did that in high school
or college or Bible school or whatever, and kind of coast.
But I think as the years go by, we're, our responsibility is to.
You know.
I think the church needs clear minds and for our entire lives.
Right?
So, you know, as these things grow and become more and more accessible,
I would I would exhort all to not don't give that away.
That's a precious thing that the Lord has given you to train and to build in you.
And don't put. It in the hands of a company
that doesn't have your best interest in mind.
It doesn't have the kingdom interest in mind. Right?
I think that's a grave error.
That we would make.
yeah.
I mean, I really like your point there about it just shaping us.
You know, we're doing the doing the mental work on it,
and if we get to understanding, it's actually
shaping our mind, shaping our brain as well.
in the development.
So, yeah.
How do you approach it in the classroom as I'm thinking about it?
I think from a couple angles.
One is everybody's worried about,
you know, how do we test people now?
How do we deal with cheating?
How do we make sure they actually are doing the work with the material?
If the things we used to use, like a well-written paper,
can be so easily faked or whatever.
that's one angle.
yeah, let's start there.
Assessment or getting students to do the work or whatever.
the classroom is is certainly that first line of, first
line of combat that you run into with, you know, AI versus classical learning.
And so.
I've heard a number of, Approaches to this.
The, you know, they start within, you know.
We can't get. Away from the technology in the classroom that's coming.
And so most colleges, including Statler, where I teach, uses a learning management
system or an LMS to do to keep track of all sorts of assignments and grades.
It's very. Helpful.
And they most of them.
Purport to include an AI detection system.
They'll they'll say, we have a built in, plagiarism detector.
That, you know, if an AI.
Written something comes in, we'll flag it and we'll tell you that is a.
I think we've.
Seen it over and over again in the statistics that that is kind of. A,
It's very
much a cat and mouse kind of game because the, the,
the system may catch a certain kind of AI written content, but the AI systems
will then evolve to get around the, the hunters essentially.
So then the hunters become a little more sophisticated than the systems do.
And so it's this back and forth. That.
Frankly, I just I don't want to get involved in with my students.
So. You know, I don't want to, you know, I don't want that to be the worry that.
The, And so my, my encouragement to them is like one operate with integrity.
I tell them on day one.
If you like.
Here's what you can use AI for.
I'm. Sure you've all been exposed to it.
You can use this.
I said, but if you're if there's a temptation to use it in a way that's
outside of that, come talk to me. Right.
I would rather.
My job here is to make you successful and to help.
And so please engage with me.
I'll help you get started so you can.
You know. It's very much. Like.
Accountability and discipleship within the congregation of a local church.
Community. Like don't
you know, just be open and frank with what's going on.
My goal here is to help you.
But within the classroom itself, I, I these days
have pushed.
Assignments that might have an I inclusion temptation off to the side.
I have a lot more students doing oral presentations.
I sort of gone back to the classic rhetoric.
Hey, here's this, here's this case we're studying.
Here's this conclusion.
I have a conversation with. Me about it.
Right.
Show me that you know what's going on.
you know.
We've gone back to pencil and paper examinations.
Right? Which, you know.
Teachers would love the efficiency
of a digital exam that the system can grade for you.
But it's also open to manipulation.
And so.
You know, if you're.
Going to take a statistics quiz with me, it's going to be
it's going to be pencil and paper.
and that's.
That's fine, I will I will gladly shoulder the little bit of extra grading burden.
To know that.
This is, this is really what you know.
And then to help you.
Along the way.
So I'm hearing you.
Hearing you do two things.
One is trying to
build trust and integrity and know your students
and the other one is,
you know, being savvy about it and removing
some of those temptations and opportunities a little bit.
So I've been out of the
out of the university world for,
like seven years or so now.
Yeah. I can't imagine how they deal with it.
In some of the classes classes I used to help with as a TA, you might have,
you know, a couple hundred students in the class and then
got 25 students assigned for each teaching assistant or something,
and, you know, writing assignments uploaded through
exactly that,
one of those learning management systems.
yeah.
With no relationship there in that volume.
It feels like you're fighting a losing game, but
so maybe if anything, it just calls us back to,
you know,
actually closer relationships and education and
things like oral exams.
I think you hit on one of the key points in.
That the the.
You have to imagine
how sort of higher education has evolved over the years that it's.
It's moved away from the small.
I don't remember the, the Oxford model, I believe they called it.
But the conference room table with an instructor and then conversation.
And we've. Moved far from that.
But that has been. The.
That has been the trajectory as the incentives for colleges
have been to grow endowment and student population.
And so they you know, I have to imagine 100 years ago,
the idea of a 300 person classroom with a single instructor
and a coterie of TAs to help would have been unthinkable to.
A, Elite university.
But now it's commonplace. And so
universities.
You know.
Take advantage from a cost basis on the efficiency of doing it that way.
There's, you know, it's
very efficient to get the information out there from one expert to 300 students.
And then have. A team to support.
But you to your point, you lose the.
Sort of any relational knowledge between instructor and student,
as well as how to, you know, individually tailor learning outcomes.
Right?
It's just not reasonable
to expect an instructor in that context to know every student.
What's their different learning style?
What are their career goals?
How do you help them along that road? Now?
I'm not suggesting that large universities are in and of themselves wrong.
But I think we have to just.
Honestly assess where where is the incentive for these institutions.
Right.
They how do they, consider themselves as doing better or worse?
And so,
you know, Sattler, where I teach happens to be a small, fairly new institution.
And so we have that
we have that advantage of sitting in this small class space for now.
but we're going to face the same pressures at some point.
Is the.
Pressure might be like grow without bound and do whatever it takes to do.
That. But my hope is that the.
This institution will resist it in favor of knowing the students,
being able to help them contend with the realities of AI.
Or any other. You know, whatever comes next, ten years from.
Now, I. Don't know.
Where we'll be, but the yeah.
If if human nature has remained the same and it has.
There will be the new version of I don't have.
Something to watch out. For. So.
Yeah.
No, I like that observation and the kind of forethought there.
Yeah. You're going to have to.
I guess being small gives you a chance to
set a deliberate trajectory, like, okay, how are we going to
how are we going to handle this.
yeah.
And as you talked about that.
It made me grateful for,
not the university setting, but, you know, some of the practices
that I've been familiar with in a church setting where we've got small Sunday
schools that are discussion based or we've got in home small groups or whatever.
You read a passage together.
Sure. Somebody might
pull up copilot on their phone and say, well,
you know, here's the background or whatever, but hopefully there's enough
people there who have studied who can ask questions about about that.
You're in there. You're face to face working on it.
and the other side of AI in the classroom?
do you give them assignments that are specifically how to learn it?
Or sometimes we just assume anybody can put something into ChatGPT.
But, you know, I've also I haven't done much myself
but seen various experts say, well, actually,
the more you know about it, the more use you'll get out of ChatGPT
if you're coming in there without any context, it's
not going to help you that much.
are there things like that
that you do to say this is how you use it?
Don't often do do that.
But I think the. I think that argument is.
A, Slippery slope argument oftentimes in that, you know.
Well.
In order for it to be useful, you have to use it a ton.
Right?
That's that's true for almost anything.
Right to, to be you know, the.
More adept
you get at it, the more you know, one, they'll say, oh, you're using it better.
They don't acknowledge the dependance that is created.
Say like, well, you know, the more you use it,
the more you're, the more you're going to be.
Like the, the, The ease from which you get from point A to point B
in an assignment or in a learning outcome becomes, becomes addictive.
Like, oh, I don't.
Know how I could do this any other way.
You know, that's the I think that is what I.
Really think we need to avoid is,
you know, fight that argument that I the.
I chuckle because there was a it was about six months ago
now this is when ChatGPT was becoming was exploding in.
Popularity and.
If you went on a job posting.
Board, there were people who would would style themselves.
They were prompt engineers, not meaning they were on time, but they.
Meaning that they would.
They had learned to write ChatGPT prompts.
And they and they were they were.
Saying that, you know, this is a real necessary skill.
Now you don't see any of those postings right, that has gone.
And I think just because we've
I. Don't think you want to jump, we want to jump on this
really rapid bandwagon of like getting good at this will be.
A, a value, you know, will become a profession.
it won't. And I think we already saw that.
And I think it just.
Yeah, it's not a.
Not an argument.
I want to, push too hard.
I don't,
I think if a student asks like, how can something like, ChatGPT.
I actually had a conversation with a computer scientist last night.
He was at our home for a Bible study and I said, well.
How about, like.
Are you using code generation GPTs right.
There's there's these engines that can generate
computer code to do all sorts of stuff.
And he said, well.
You know.
We kind of do. That.
But the, the,
the. Message I have from my students oftentimes is like,
understand what the model is good.
For, right?
If and if it's a morally neutral thing.
Right.
Like I'd like to create a code to update my website a little bit.
Wonder. Wonderful, right?
That's what it's good for. And it saves you time and effort.
But the to me.
That is an effective use case of something like I.
But there's so many others that I think short circuit our ability to grow
and to change.
They kind of like we were talking about before you lose the.
the. Synapse development that you might have had if you had.
Struggled the, you know, I, I come.
From an engineering background and sometimes in.
Programing. When you're working on a computer
programing project, it doesn't work forever.
And at some point your mind tells you, I don't think it's ever going to work.
Right.
You almost you give up in. Despair until.
You realize that moment of.
Like, oh, right there is where my.
Error was.
And now that I fixed it, the whole thing works. It unravels.
And it's this very satisfying. Moment.
That if you don't, if you've not labored through,
you'll boy, you just you miss so much
opportunity.
Yeah.
So even in coding, even in the most computer
computer intensive occupation there is
got the dangers.
Yeah.
I don't really mess with code, but
that was one of my places.
Using, Microsoft Copilot at work was actually spreadsheets
and using some formulas that were a little bit beyond my range of competence.
it worked pretty good for that.
But the same thing would apply.
Like, that wasn't, though.
That would not be the way to to really get really good at using them.
And, you know, I had developed spreadsheet skills
the old fashioned way to, to a certain extent.
And so copilot, let me do
a few things that were a little bit more advanced.
but again,
exactly to your point, it didn't develop, you know.
Okay.
Now I have regex formulas in my spreadsheets.
I still don't know how to write regex,
for example.
So Again, to zoom out, we've talked about this from a bunch of angles.
you know,
engaging in deep study rather than just looking up the answers.
something that you keep coming back to.
how would you articulate maybe the the fundamental or basic
value of study?
Comes down to the
both. From the.
From Deuteronomy.
But also echoed in Jesus's words of.
What does it mean to love the. Lord.
With all your heart, soul, mind, and all highlight mind and strength.
And so we we have this charge.
And I think it it is.
For the Lord gave us minds and challenging questions and problems for.
Our own good. Right.
They're they're an actual good for us.
Right. The.
The scriptures in the sense,
in a real theological sense that it is the food for our souls.
Right?
We need to like.
When we study, when we meditate. On.
The text, on what God has said, there's a.
You know, the truth of. Who he is.
And love for him is illuminated and.
Grown and you know, we can you can.
Arrive at the same destination, right?
Either, you know, when in.
In study, you know, say you. Are.
Doing an app for a Bible reading plan on your an app on your phone,
and you just decide to have it.
You know, I had a read through in my car at 10x the speed
right which you can do, you can set up in the app to do that.
But or I'm going to at at cost.
It might cost me sleep.
I'm going to get up and open a paper Bible and,
and work my way through each of the pages as I go.
And there's a there's a difference.
There's a true difference there. Right?
If you, I don't. Want to use a.
It doesn't I don't mean it to be a silly analogy,
but when you're you're driving from Boston,
where I live, to Portland, Maine, which is a beautiful city.
Right? You can take the highway there and it goes pretty straight.
It gets you,
you know, it doesn't take very long, takes an hour and a half or so to get there.
if you.
Take the back roads, though, you actually get to know what the state of Maine is.
Like, what you like.
You know, on the highway, you miss all of those things.
And so.
I think in with.
Regard to deep study, you can get to the destination.
But you.
You have missed the richness of what you could have.
Right. If and yeah, I would I.
Would ask the value question of like, okay, so I got to the destination.
You know. I didn't have the richness. That's fine.
What is the cost versus value you've gained?
Or you may have gained a little bit of time, a little bit of efficiency.
But it but.
Ultimately you got the answer and it came up sort of empty.
Right?
You've you've you have shoed.
Opportunities to learn, to grow, to be enriched for the sake of.
Speed.
Right. And I. Think as Christians, we're.
We're. Called to resist that. Right?
The goal is not just to.
You know, get through our.
Lives as quickly and efficiently and painlessly as possible.
It's to glorify the Lord who saved us.
Right.
And so in in doing that, we need to see him in his richness.
And I, I, I.
Have a hard time thinking that that comes in another way
other than deep study in deep community and discipleship.
Right?
Which you cannot that's not those are not things we can outsource.
They they they are costly.
But they are. Good. They grow our souls. We.
I heard someone describe it recently. That,
he was he's a.
This is a pastor who's a fan of deep.
Study, and he he.
Said, I,
I don't want to give deep study assignments
in order to create people who have large minds and small souls,
like, we actually want it to be both things large, right?
We want.
Large minds that are educated, that gives us.
Breadth of soul.
We want to, you know, know.
And love Jesus as fully as we can in this life.
And so, until we meet him face to face, right?
That's our.
So I guess that's one, one charge for scriptural study, but also in.
You know, take it into a.
A workplace context, right.
When you're trying to learn a skill or a trade, again, I read.
Another just short article. About, a.
computer scientist at Google, so, you know, well-known company.
But what made this individual contributor employee so special?
He was a high ranking individual was that he could look at a.
At a problem or not even it.
Wasn't even a known problem.
But his intuition would tell him something.
That something was’nt optimal.
It would it could be faster.
It could. Be, And less memory intensive.
And intuitively, he could dig down into the weeds and in about two hours
do what it would take a team of lesser trained engineers weeks to complete.
Right.
And that is not something that that.
AI can replicate, right?
It can. Most computer scientists are like, I don't want AI to.
Code for me. Right. This is and they're not worried about their jobs.
They just don't like how well it does it.
And so.
what is it that.
Creates this engineer's intuition to solve a problem
so effectively, or even in the carpentry or the, in the contracting trades.
There's, there's cleverness and there's intuition
and there's brilliance that is shown by some.
Like how.
Did you think to solve it. That way. Right.
And it and it.
Was not by taking shortcuts and learning.
It was by observation and.
Mistake and. Recovery and resilience.
And so. That like.
If you want it, if you want to be excellent at something.
You you can't take shortcuts.
You have to fail. You have to learn.
You have to do the hard study, to be trained.
So your mind operates as a tool. Right? I.
I think that is if I had to give a pitch for why.
Study is so.
Important. and I won't even say.
You know, I think deep study is a is certainly a valid term.
But, I think we as Christians, we.
We, we may.
Overuse the, may overuse of the term depth,
you know, what does it mean to be deep versus shallow?
I think the, the. Charges. To engage.
And learn and things that,
that actually are a challenge to you that make your mind fatigued.
Right? That you're, you know.
You can't expect someone to, to get up and run a marathon just by walking
from the couch to the fridge every day.
Right? They have. To go do things that are that are. Tiring.
They have to. They have to learn and be trained.
And it's the same with our minds.
We we have to do things that are.
Hard, you. Know, you have to. Go.
I love here at Sattler
that they force all students to learn the original biblical languages.
For many, that's hard.
And for many in the American church, that's terribly intimidating.
But like.
That's your your mind can be pushed in that. Way.
It can be stretched.
Right.
God gave us a written revelation that we're to interact with.
And so.
Boy, it's, sorry your going to get me going on this.
But I think.
Doing the hard work of read and study.
Like.
I think God, God gave us that for a reason.
We're meant to pursue him in those ways.
Yeah.
I hope you guys don't lose that original language emphasis.
Yeah, that's something that's important and worth.
Worth fighting for and maintaining
I was going to ask you, ask you for a concluding plug for the Studious Life.
And I think you've given us a pretty strong plug here.
I'm hearing words like,
yeah, growth, doing the work.
loving God by actually treating his word as food to be
worked on, meditated on, digested,
relationships.
Yeah.
thanks for articulating that.
is there anything else you'd like to close with?
So you mentioned relationships, too, and I, you know, I think one of our.
You know.
As Christians, we have these relational calls where the Lord is a relational God.
And so he's given us. That, that.
Call one is.
In, I.
Think, in the context of discipleship. Right.
You're, you know. Older Christian mentoring and discipling.
A younger one, I Think, our effectiveness
as disciple ers or disciples even. Is.
Determined how we've,
I guess, is a function of how well we've we've studied
how we've been humble and willing to train our minds to do that.
Right.
If someone you know, if a disciple or I say a mentee of.
Mine came with a with.
A deep, grievous sin or a trauma that had occurred.
I think.
I would I would have been irresponsible if I hadn't put in the time
and labor beforehand in order to wisely counsel that person.
Right.
So I think the the shortcuts.
We, you know, we may if we avoid the, the.
Studious life,
we're going to find ourselves in a place where we're out of our depth
fairly quickly. Right?
Because the world around us is demanding like what is true of the Lord.
What is true in His Word?
How do I how do.
I apply this counsel to my life?
And that takes wisdom to do, and that wisdom is. Only.
A book of Proverbs tells us is.
Like we.
We wait daily in his gates. We meditate on his.
You know, we go over to Psalms in 119.
We meditate on his law. Day and night. Right.
That's the it's.
Not meant to be quick, but it is meant to be fruitful.
And so we want to move in that way and.
But also in our.
So discipleship on the one hand, but evangelism on another to.
You know, we live in a world that, you know.
Is increasingly looking at Christians as any number of epithets of.
or in sort. Of insulting terms.
And that's fine.
Christ himself was the.
Victim of much of that.
But the, I think.
The studious mind that that has put in the time to learn.
The truth of the.
Word, how to respond. To, to.
Arguments, to charges, to.
Untruth.
To that the gospel would come clearly in speech.
Right?
Is something that is, is a slow grown.
Tree, if you want to.
Think about it that way. It's not a it's not an instantaneous thing.
You know, I probably can't go to.
Well, I could go to ChatGPT and say. Okay, if.
This argument is made against me, what do I say?
And it might give you some helpful tips, but when the pressure is
on, are you going to be able to recall those instantly?
You know, someone says like, you know, it gives you a charge against scriptures.
know, like.
Hold on, let me pull out my phone and punch it into the LLM for an answer.
Here.
They'd say, like what?
You don't you don't.
Care enough about this to know.
And we want to.
Anticipate and avoid a charge.
Like that, that, you know, the. Lord is important to.
Us enough that we love his Word.
We we love the study.
and I want to.
I guess the last comment I'll.
I'll give is I.
The Holy Spirit is is
so gracious in. That, you know, maybe.
You you hear what I'm saying, and you think, well, I'm not a student.
I don't like studying.
I don't like reading.
I don't like, The the.
Graciousness of the spirit in the word is such that, like.
Not, we're not all. Gifted the same way.
I'm a very studious person, but you don't have to be
anything like me to experience the the growth of that studious life.
Right? Maybe,
I’m thinking with our own, within my home church community.
Challenging folks to like.
To busy yourself enough with study and reading.
So that you you have if you.
Have these little like gaps of time during the day.
You you.
Have to fill them with Scripture in order to get done what you're trying to get.
Done.
Right.
Like you're you're involved in this enough
that it keeps bleeding into these little moments.
That you you.
Thought you might have a spare time. Where, you know.
Previously you may have gone to TikTok or to Instagram or some sort of diversion.
It's like, what would.
We take those little moments and put Scripture in. There?
Like, what would.
What would the Lord do with. That? Right.
And yeah, I.
I don't know, but I'm led and I'm led in faith in from the scriptures that.
Like.
He will bless and grow fruit from those things. So.
You know, there is no Christian.
Who is outside of like.
God's promise to engage and to study and to love him with our.
Minds. Right? We're we're all there.
And he. Meets us where we. Are.
You know, he's not going to just because he teaches me something, he doesn't
teach you the same thing at the same pace is kind of irrelevant.
Right?
He's building his church in the way he wants to so we can trust him in it.
Yeah. Yeah.
Thanks for bringing us back to that.
fundamental reminder.
I guess it's easy for us to.
You know,
we hear things about the importance of being in scripture, being in the word.
And it's easy for it to,
get old or slip past us or take it for granted.
And I appreciate you just pushing in,
hopefully helping to re-inspired us, there.
so, yeah, let's wrap that up for the episode.
So, yeah, to our, guests and viewers and listeners,
thanks for joining us for this episode with Ben
and you check out things.
You can find us on YouTube, podcast on our website, anabaptistperspectives.org.
We also do essays in written form,
which you can find as Essays for King Jesus as a podcast.
or again on our website at anabaptistperspectives.org.
Thanks for joining us.