When I’m feeling my own prayerlessness, one of the Bible passages that will often both convict and awaken me is the apostle Paul’s prayer at the start of his letter to the Ephesians. Thankfully I was given cause to dwell there again last week. It’s a corker. Take a look:

For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all God’s people, I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, and his incomparably great power for us who believe.  (Ephesians 1:15-19, NIV)

Naturally it’s always encouraging to hear someone has been praying for you. But Paul goes a step beyond that because he tells these churches precisely what he’s been praying for them. When was the last time someone told you that? And that’s where things get surprising. In fact, it blows most of my usual prayer requests out of the water. At its heart it’s a prayer for a greater knowledge of God. As the translation above puts it, Paul prays that the Ephesians would “know God better”. Paul reveals that his priority for the Ephesians is they’d know God better and, crucially, that he is dependent upon God for that knowledge. As Tim Keller says in his recent book on prayer:

It seems that the apostle [Paul] does not see prayer as merely a way to get things from God but as a way to get more of God himself.

Of course, we’re often used to thinking about knowledge in purely factual terms. And I suppose sometimes we can be tempted to think about Christianity purely in that way too, as if it were all about gathering up Bible trivia. Don’t get me wrong. Knowing God is factual in one sense, in that we need to know who the one true God is, what he is like, and what he has done. You flick through the Bible and there’s a huge emphasis on knowing God truly, and holding firmly to that true knowledge. False-teaching and fashioning a god in your own image is a real possibility, if we’re to take the Bible writers seriously. And so if our knowledge of God isn’t grounded in his revelation in the Scriptures, then we’re simply playing with fire. But Paul specifically asks God that “the eyes of your hearts may be enlightened…”, not merely our brain cells. It’s more than knowing about God.

This knowing is relational and spiritual. The Bible is a relational book. After all, we call it God’s word because it is God communicating with us, and by nature communication is relational. The goal of relational knowledge can never be storing up facts, notebooks and folders as an end in themselves. Instead it’s the same as any relationship: the fruit of relational knowledge is responding accordingly to the person we’re knowing, be that in love, trust, obedience, following, listening, etc. In fact you see that in Ephesians itself: two of the big verbs that follow the emphasis on knowing (ch. 1-3) are walking and standing (ch. 4-6). Evidently knowing God and his plans is meant to take shape in a changed life.

…There is a sense in which these urgent needs are merely symptomatic of a far more serious lack. The one thing we most urgently need in Western Christendom is a deeper knowledge of God. We need to know God better.

When it comes to knowing God, we are a culture of the spiritually stunted. So much of our religion is packaged to address our felt needs—and these are almost uniformly anchored in our pursuit of our own happiness and fulfillment. God simply becomes the Great Being who, potentially at least, meets our needs and fulfills our aspirations. We think rather little of what he is like, what he expects of us, what he seeks in us. We are not captured by his holiness and his love; his thoughts and words capture too little of our imagination, too little of our discourse, too few of our priorities.

In the biblical view of things, a deeper knowledge of God brings with it massive improvement in the other areas mentioned: purity, integrity, evangelistic effectiveness, better study of Scripture, improved private and corporate worship, and much more. But if we seek these things without passionately desiring a deeper knowledge of God, we are selfishly running after God’s blessings without running after him.

(D. A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation, 15-16.

Full-time theological education is a costly thing. Costly because it will often mean a geographical switch, including moving house and saying goodbye to much-loved friends and family. Costly because it will probably mean leaving behind the particular church you were involved with and at least pressing pause on the ministry opportunities you were part of there. Costly because it literally costs money, and at the end of the day someone’s got to foot that bill, whether it be a church organisation, supporters, or the individual concerned.

So, is it worth those costs?

As has been noted here, it seems there’s a bit of a trend at the moment for answering ‘no’. For a start, part-time, non-residential training is a whole lot cheaper. That means this issue is something the Church of England is particularly weighing up. But such ‘mixed-mode’ training also allows you to be part-time, perhaps working with a church for 3 or 4 days a week, which can seem like a benefit. It also allows you to remain in the same place, again, something that has plus-points. And obviously different people will have different circumstances, meaning that for some ‘mixed-mode’ forms are the only reasonable option. But does the mode of training impact upon its effectiveness? And as this helpful post on the CofE’s latest workings asks, how are we defining effectiveness anyway?

There’s also a trend of seeing one’s ‘time at college’ as not really about the training itself, and more just an opportunity to be involved in the ministry opportunities of the particular town or city the college happens to be in. I guess this is rooted in a scepticism or distrust of ‘theology’, but it also seems to smack a bit of arrogance and short-sightedness. Certainly I couldn’t imagine being ‘ready’ without the training I’m being given.

So given all this, why bother really investing in theological education?

Being about 80% of the way through a three year full-time spell at theological college, I’m already so glad this has been part of my training. I’m so glad that the Church of England generously funded me for two years, and I’m so glad that a bunch of friends and Trusts backed me from their own pockets so that I could stay for this third year.

Why? Well, I think the video below goes some way to explain and, in short, it’s because the end goal isn’t about me.

I’d spent two years on a church-based ministry training scheme (which was excellent) and three years working in a junior staff role for another church (again, a great experience and learning curve), but I’d still not swap these past three years, full-time at Oak Hill, for anything else. Being able to set time aside to think, to learn, to grow… to be formed, it has been a massive privilege.

But ultimately this privilege is not for my sake, there’s a much more worthy matter at heart: stewardship – seeking to be the best possible gift for the sake of the church…

You can read the accompanying document, featuring Don Carson, Tim Keller and others, here.