Those who think they know something do not yet know as they ought to know. (1 Corinthians 8:2)

I love this picture. You will recognize it from last Friday’s post. I’m using it again because I want you to study it. In many ways it says everything you need to know about transforming the marketplace.

A picture, like all of art, is so much more than a picture. A picture is full of what you bring to it. I can see God in this picture. I can see everything we are going to be talking about on Wednesday nights in this picture. We could talk for hours about this picture, and you would all come up with things I can’t see here. Others of you could tell stories that would keep us up half the night based on what this picture brings to the surface from your memories. Still others would not see anything very significant here at all… just two people walking and two other people window-shopping. It all depends on what you bring to the picture.

What you bring to the picture is always more than the picture. You bring the sum of your life until now. You bring your experiences and your thoughts in process, and if you remain open and able to learn, you will continually see more in the picture – indeed in any picture – than you thought was there. In this way, what you bring to the picture will always be growing.

The only barrier to this kind of growth is thinking you already know what there is to know about something. I am doomed if I bring to this Bible study what I brought before. If I teach only what I taught last time, I am bringing nothing new to the picture. As long as I realize how little I know, the truth will grow in my experience, even as it stays the same in the Bible.

This is why Wednesday night’s study is so important, and why it’s so important to hear it again and again, because we have been hearing something else, subtly, for as long as we have been alive.

What we’re going to be talking about is not just a Christian thing; it’s a human thing. And it matters not where you are in the scheme of things – whether you are a Christian or not, or whether you’ve been a Christian for a day or for 60 years. You will get something out of this if you don’t know everything already.

The end result, of our time together should be that your life on one level will become much simpler, while on another level it will become much more complicated because of what you will be bringing to the picture that isn’t there now.

What do you bring to this picture? Let’s find out.