Sharpening Iron

“You’re a day late,” said the man, grumpy from a long day at the office at he sat across the world from me. “Yes I know,” I reply. “And I don’t like to make excuses—” “Then don’t,” he snaps. I pause for a moment, considering. “Okay, fine: I do like making excuses. My schedule at the bike shop changed starting this week, and I’m still acclimating.” “Get on with it, then,” he muttered with a wave of his hand.

From "How to Train Your Dragon"

“As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another,” (Prov. 27:17). A favorite verse of people who love community. Team it up with “Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it" (Prov. 22:6) and you’ve got the making of a real weapon.

See, when you sharpen a knife, you run the stone in the same direction each stroke; if you run it backwards, you can destroy much of the work you’ve just done. In much the same way, new Christians should feed only on the Word – because it’s new, and there’s a lot to learn, and the wisdom of the world can ruin what you’ve read if you take in worldly wisdom too soon.

But I think where we misstep is we keep on sharpening all our lives: we read the Scripture and only the Scripture, and talk to people we agree with, and put ourselves in front of ideas that we already agree with. The phrase “you can sharpen to too fine a point” didn’t spring up because it was wrong. Blades are made for cutting, and they are not doing what they were made for while they are being sharpened.

And when you do use them for what they’re made for, they dull, they become pitted and nicked, and sometimes they rust. Before they become useless they need to rest, oil, and sharpen again – but only so they can go back out and become dull, pitted, and nicked again.

See, when we reinforce what we already believe by putting in front of ourselves ideas that we already believe in, we do just that: reinforce what we already believe. We make it stronger. We shore up its battlements. We board up its windows and gates and strengthen it against opposing ideas. And that’s a very good thing.

Unless what we already believe is wrong.

Try as we might, we all often create God in our image; we believe God is a certain way, and we reinforce that belief through our thoughts, our cherry-picking Scripture texts, cherry-picking friends and interactions, and shore up and board up and build up and strengthen until God presents Himself to us in absolute fact and all our minds can do is ignore His truth because it opposes our firm belief.

“Thus you nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition” Jesus said. Do you think the Pharisees didn’t have Scripture to back up their beliefs? Do you think they thought they were wrong? Do you think they didn’t have some people who agreed with them?

We need better criteria before we believe in God all the way to the second death.