Over the past several months, I have been given an education in the art of curiosity.  My twin daughters Elizabeth and Anna are curious about everything.  Now almost 13 months old, they get around pretty good and anything is fair game for their insatiable curiosity.  They make good use of all their senses to examine and inspect whatever they get their hands on.  My wife and I have a full-time job just making sure their curiosity doesn’t harm them.  The world is theirs to explore and they are doing a great job of it at this stage in their development.  For Steph and I, it has been fun (also scary) to watch how their curiosity plays itself out.

As any parent will attest, this is nothing out of the ordinary.  Kids are curious. Virtually everything is new to them and they desire to know and master whatever they set their eyes on.  Even though “curiosity killed the cat,” it is a God-given blessing and even a necessity.  It is a vital part of learning and growing and reaching our full potential in life.  Most of the time, the employee who “knows how it works” is going to be promoted before the employee who “knows how to work it.”  It doesn’t take long to figure out how to operate something, but it takes curiosity to know how to take it apart and correctly put it back together again.

Curiosity is a good thing, but I have noticed that many people eventually lose their curious nature.  At some point in their life, they stop exploring, inspecting, asking, learning, and probing.  There could be many reasons for this, but some people simply think there is nothing left to learn.  They have mastered the fine art of life and no further growth is necessary, or so they think.  The apostle Paul would cringe at such reasoning.  He told the Philippian believers:

[8] Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ [9] and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith—[10] that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, [11] that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.  (Philippians 3:8-11 ESV)

For Paul, the greatest thing in the world was knowing Jesus Christ.  If anyone had a knowledge of the Son of God, it was the apostle Paul.  But Paul had a powerful desire to continue to grow in Christ and was not content with his present knowledge of Christ.  It is one thing to “know about Christ” and it is another thing to “know Christ” in a personal way.  To know about the historical Jesus is not the same as knowing Christ as your Savior.  Paul knew this better than anyone.

How many Christian’s do you know that seem to have lost their “curiosity” about the risen Christ?  If your answer is anything like mine, it’s too many.  They have a basic knowledge of theology, but they lack a desire for more.  You can always count on their attendance at a fellowship event at your church, but you can almost guarantee they will be absent from Sunday School or the weekly bible study.  The great tragedy is that they think they know Christ when they really don’t.  These types of people maintain a curiosity for certain things, but not what is Supreme.  They continue to read their hobby magazines and they are curious to see who won the football game, but they won’t pick up their bible so that they might know more of the One, True, God.  It breaks my heart to think that these people continue populate our churches and are not compelled to go further in their relationship with Christ.

When we see how beautiful, glorious, wonderful, and powerful Jesus Christ is, we start to see (like Paul) how silly it is to invest our time and energy in the world.  Why let foolish curiosities rule your life when God gives us the opportunity to know Him who is Supreme and Preeminent? (Colossians 1:18)  Perhaps you should ask God to fill you with a desire and curiosity to better know the One who is worthy of all praise – the Lord Jesus Christ.  May God richly bless you.