...all training is painful and frustrating on the way to skills that later become second nature and lead to greater joy. The person who will not embrace the pain and frustration will remain at lower levels of achievement and joy. For example, learning to drive a car is tense. You have to remember so many things at the same time, especially if the car has a manual transmission—look both ways, take foot off accelerator, apply brake, push in clutch, change gears, let out clutch, put on blinker, turn wheel, push accelerator, and so on. It all feels uncertain and scary. But if you give up, you will forfeit the joys of driving where you please and being able to carry on a conversation while doing so, which happens only when driving has become second nature.
So it is with piano playing, and fly casting, and throwing a ball, and knitting, and learning a foreign language, and reading great books. At one point these tasks were all difficult and awkward. Learning the skill and practicing it was not fun. The joy is on the other side of the hard work. This is basic to all growing up. Part of maturity is the principle of deferred gratification. If you cannot embrace the pain of learning but must have instant gratification, you forfeit the greatest rewards of life.
So it is with reading the Bible. The greater riches are for those who will work hard to understand all that is really there. There are hundreds of connections and meanings and implications in the Bible that do not leap off the page at first reading—at least not for me. I have to slow down and start asking questions about the words and the connections. That is, thinking has to become intentional.
- John Piper,
Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God
, p. 43, 44
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