Do you value every learning experience? If you love learning you will seek it everywhere it is offered and will have encountered a wide variety of teachers. What type of teachers do you like best? Those who have studied their subject or those who have lived it? Who is better able to communicate enthusiasm and passion? Even in the academic world experience matters. What about instruction in your faith? Do you look only for academic credentials? If there is more to teaching than line upon line and precept upon precept, what would it be? What type of teacher are you?

Do you take your dreams seriously? What is your basis for deciding one way or the other? Have you noticed that there are many dreams in the Bible, and in every case they are considered to be full of real meaning? This principle holds up from Pharaoh to the wife of Pontius Pilate. Neither of these were covenant people in the way you understand it, and further they were separated by gender, time, language, and culture. They could hardly have been more different. Do you wonder how they knew their dreams had meaning? You won’t get the right answers by asking the wrong questions.

Do you make a distinction between universal truth and particular truth? You meet people who have particular interests such as their hobbies, and they are quite knowledgeable about them but you may have no interest in those subjects. Yet there is also universal truth that applies to everyone, questions of eternity and being, identity and meaning and purpose. Some people studiously avoid pursuing these questions and claim no spirituality or beliefs but they cannot escape them because everyone is affected by them.

Are you holy? Is it easier to think of yourself this way if you consider yourself in an individualistic and isolated way? Yet that is not the way you live. For you live in a community and the more you identify with common humanity the more substance there will be to your righteousness. How are those who regard themselves as holy in their isolation seen by those who observe them? Aren’t they regarded as alienated and therefore less holy rather than more so? When you interact with people your fears, insecurities, and vulnerability will collide with theirs.