I have a confession to make. Several, in fact.

As a pianist with an undergraduate degree in music performance, you’d expect that I would have sat down with my two older boys (now ages 8 and 9) and taught them how to play the piano, and that by now they’d be playing Rachmaninoff concertos. But that didn’t happen. They have had piano lessons, but not from me.

As a former competitive swimmer, who was racing on the swim team since age four, you’d expect that I would have been in the pool with my two older boys teaching them how to swim, and that by now they’d be racing in the Junior Olympics and breaking Michael Phelps’ records. But that didn’t happen. They have had swim lessons, and both are getting good at the various strokes. But they didn’t learn from me.

Why? If I had the knowledge and the skill sets, why did not I not teach my boys how to play the piano and how to swim? The answer is more simple than you’d think. I don’t know how. Okay, maybe that’s too simple of an answer. Here’s a better way of putting it. I don’t know how to teach my kids the skills I have. Sure, I can sit down and play a Chopin Ballade, or jump in the pool and swim 100 meter breaststroke. But I don’t know how to translate those complicated actions into the simple, step-by-step actions that form the building blocks of the skills I have. Or, to put it a different way, I don’t remember how I learned those skills. I have them, but it’s been so long since I learned them that I can’t remember the foundational things that led me to what I know now.

It’s possible to advance in something, be it an activity like playing the piano or swimming, or something more cerebral like an academic discipline, to the point where you’ve lost the fundamentals. Of course, you have the fundamentals…they’ve been burned into your muscle memory through years and years of repetition and practice. But the steps you took to learn those fundamentals have been lost and you’re functioning off of that muscle memory like it was instinct. In the case of teaching someone else how to learn what you know, it becomes really problematic. How do I communicate complex actions or concepts in bite-size ways that build on one another without overwhelming them? That’s the burden of the teacher, and there’s an entire discipline devoted to thinking through this process called pedagogy.

Now, we could use this principle as a bridge to talk about how to teach, and that would be a helpful topic to address some time (mental note filed), but today I’m more interested in the other lesson this offers…the lesson of losing the fundamentals. There’s a famous story of Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers, who developed a tradition of returning to the fundamentals every pre-season. David Marannis writes, “He took nothing for granted. He began a tradition of starting from scratch, assuming that the players were blank slates who carried over no knowledge from the year before… He began with the most elemental statement of all. “Gentlemen,” he said, holding a pigskin in his right hand, ‘this is a football.’” You see, the same principle applied. It didn’t matter how “professional” a person has become in their field of expertise. The fundamentals are the fundamentals and if you lose those, it will begin to show.

Unfortunately, this principle hasn’t caught on as well in the church. I think there’s a general expectation that as a Christian progresses in the faith, through growth in the Word and growth in righteousness, that there’s less and less need to look back at the basics. But that’s a disaster waiting to happen. The gospel is the basics. And, as we should all recognize…the gospel is everything. Forgetting the basics leads to heresy. It leads to moral failure. And it can lead to apostasy. There have been countless examples in Christian academia, in the pastorate, and in the pew.

Now, obviously, there needs to be growth. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews asserted it plainly, chiding his readers for their relative immaturity in the faith:

“About this [the priesthood of Christ] we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull in hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil” (Heb. 5:11-14).

So there’s definitely something wrong when a Christian isn’t maturing, is only feeding off of the very basic tenets of the Christian faith, and doesn’t have an interest, an appetite, or a capacity for the deeper things of the Christian faith. But even in the passage just cited, notice that the author’s words sound a lot like Vince Lombardi’s:

Hebrews: “You need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God.”
Lombardi: “This is a football.”

In other words, in both cases, the basic fundamentals had been lost. In the case of Green Bay, they had suffered a horrible previous season. In the case of the Jewish readers of Hebrews, they were beginning to return to Judaism. I can’t think of a clearer picture of the consequences of forgetting the fundamentals than that.

How do you grow in your faith…or to put it like the author of Hebrews, to be “the mature…who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil”? How do you do that, but at the same time not lose the fundamentals? The answer is, you return to the basics often. You go back to refresh, but not to stay. That’s how you “build yourself up on your most holy faith” (Jude 20) without the risk of building your faith on a crumbling foundation.

For the last seven months, we’ve devoted our monthly Worship in the Round service to a series called Biblical Doctrine, where we’re exploring the basic theology of the Christian faith. Yes, there’s times when we go deep in those studies. It’s always going to be that way. But every believer needs to return to the basics of Christian theology from time to time. Who is man? Who is God and what is he like? What is the Bible? What is sin, salvation, and the church? And what will happen in the future? All these are the major categories of Christian doctrine that form the superstructure of the Christian faith and a biblical worldview. They also happen to be the key for us to understand the issues of our times…to have the power “to distinguish good from evil.”

You may be able to get away with forgetting the basics as a pianist. Maybe as a swimmer. Maybe even as a professional football player. But not as a Christian.

If you haven’t made it to Worship in the Round yet, make it a priority to catch the next one. It’s a great time to cap off the Lord’s Day by singing together, hearing testimonies from believers in the waters of baptism, and learning the doctrines that make up your most holy faith. They’re held on the first Sunday of each month at 5pm in the auditorium, and there is nursery care available for children ages three and younger.

Below, I’ve linked to the previous messages so you can catch up in anticipation for October when we explore the doctrine of sin and its effects on us and on the world we live in.

{{section-monklet-latest-sermon | find_category=”worship-in-the-round”}}

{{section-monklet-latest-sermons-offset-1 | find_category=”worship-in-the-round”}}