Are you teachable? The key to building anything is to first build a solid foundation. Are you solidly committed to the word of God? Do you believe it all or do you take issues with some of it? Do you fight against the word? Have you received Jesus into your heart and do you let him work in your life?
Matthew 28:19 Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
Part of our mandate is to be disciples and then to go and make disciples. What does that mean exactly? A disciple is a student. So what this verse is saying is that you are to be a student of Jesus and you going around teaching everyone what you know about the gospel of the Kingdom and making sure everyone is baptized including yourself.
What trips us up here is that we spend our time religiously arguing the points we don’t agree with. So to avoid the real issues of building solid foundation and to look smart and to feed our ego and puff out our chest we decide to argue or stop learning.
So when you say, “I’ve read the bible 5 times, I already know it”, yes you do know it, but remember that the bible is LIVING word. Now, ask yourself a really important question today ~ When I look in the mirror do I look like I did 10 years ago? If the answer is no, then why do you think the bible will look the same year after year just because you’ve read it?
Keep a teachable spirit. Read, grow, learn, there are things we still don’t know. My husband and I read a passage of scripture just the other night after Friday night biblestudy that we’d read a million times before and yet, it popped out to us as significant for the first time. It sparked discussion and it sparked interest and study.
What’s the cost of not having a teachable spirit? Getting stuck in your life, falling for a lie, never reaching your full potential, and the worst is getting a critical spirit. In the book, The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, Wormwood, who is a Satan’s officer, tells the demons that if they can just keep the believer critical he won’t learn anything. Let him look around and critique the church, keep him critical and he’ll never grow and mature. He’ll spend his time always debating and despising and he will never really capture the gospel. What’s worse is he’ll duplicate his critical spirit. I want to be molded, even when I have squash every single ideal I think I may have right for the truth.
Pastor Susan 
As I’ve previously mentioned, I grew up in a conservative and exclusive church organization. I have never really renounced my heritage nor sought to bludgeon their doctrines or teachers. Why? I grew to know a loving, forgiving, gracious and wholly beautiful Savior there through very godly, albeit somewhat legalistic, people. I am not a part of the organization but neither do I criticize them as a whole, though I do speak to what I disagree with them on now. That said, I still attend services sometimes and associate with those I grew up with in the church. By this I show that I accept them as believers in the same Jesus while acknowledging our differences.
Jesus spoke of unity in the church as a key sign to its success and witness. The divisions in the church (and I’m including every denomination or sect connected to it) have served to turn a lot of people off to the gospel. These people might have been turned off by something else anyway, but we should give them no excuse to reject our Lord by fighting amongst ourselves.
My younger brother declared his disagreement with the denomination we grew up in and for a time remained angry at their “lies and legalistic” handling of the Bible. He wondered why I didn’t do the same, but eventually came to understand that if I reflect the attitude I despise as godless I am no different. I am determined to be teachable by even those I see as oppressive or too liberal. I want to see truth not my opinion of truth.
A hard goal I know, but a worthy one. 🙂