When was the last time you learned a new skill?
For me, it was hunting. Long story short, I didn’t grow up in a culture or environment that included this kind of sportsmanship. We fished, we went to the mountains occasionally, and we for sure ate meat, but it wasn't until I moved across the country that I found myself holding a weapon in the mountains for the express purpose of finding an animal, harvesting it, and eating the fruits of my labor for the foreseeable future.
As an adult learner in this space, I felt behind. I put pressure on myself to quickly reach the experience level of the guys who graciously helped us our first season and had spent their entire lives learning the craft. Suffice it to say, it was a frustrating first fall for me, even after finally having a successful hunt.
As I was learning, my thought was that these people were my age. We had the same gear, the same amount of time to get out, and were going (together) to the same spots. The only difference? They had the experience. And I mistakenly couldn’t understand why I wasn’t achieving the same results they were when I saw the posts about their big bucks.
You may not be learning how to hunt, or do anything quite as complex, but how often do we all play the comparison game? We’re afforded the same opportunities as others, but the difference between them and us is the journey that got us there.
We most often see this in job interview processes. You applied for a job, interviewed well, but the rejection email said they offered the position to someone “more qualified” or “more experienced.”
Maybe you picked up a sport in high school and played with other athletes who had been kicking, throwing, or hitting since before they could read or were out of diapers. It was an ego hit when you were named the backup behind them, and you blamed your effort in tryouts and conditioning instead of realizing they have more reps over time.
To take this a step deeper, we play this comparison game with other Christians. You see someone who uses a lot of big spiritual words they actually understand, hear about the amazing prayer time they had this morning, and notice how many verses they can quote from memory. It can make you feel less-than, even though your faith walk may be younger or shorter than that person’s.
In all of these scenarios, what do the results make us do?
Speed up. Run before we can walk. Take on more than we can handle.
Like diving into the deep end of a pool on the second day of swimming lessons, when we try to accelerate our progress beyond what’s healthy, scalable, and manageable.
You raise your hand for a project at work that’s outside your depth of field because you want the experience that could’ve gotten you the other job.
You push too hard at practice, to the point of injuring yourself, because you think that that’s what will be the difference maker between you and the starter.
You increase your volume of Bible reading, church involvement, and spiritual growth resources to the point where you’re just checking a box rather than getting something out of it, purely because you see that other person doing the same thing and they’re closer to God.
I wish I could say the third example, of playing the comparison game with other Christians, in this section was hypothetical. I watched it in real time this past week with someone who, being new in their faith and hungry for the Lord, found themselves in deep-end topics and concepts before their faith had found any foundation.
This is why I want to camp on this main point:
The edges of Scripture only make sense from its center. Faith built from the fringe inward has nothing holding it together when the fringe gets strange.
I’m all for getting deep. I do this research, read the sources I quote, and engage non-orthodox ideas because it’s a necessary part of the growth process to better understand and affirm what we believe. I’ve written extensively on the topics that are absolutely considered “fringe,” like this post. After all, a faith that goes unchallenged is a faith that can’t be questioned, and God invites us to ask questions and bring our uncertainties to him.
But there is a time and a place for evaluating ideas like these. Only after we’ve found our footing and are convinced of what we believe can we take the next steps.
So, if you’re younger in your faith, or even drawn to concepts on the edge because you think “we aren’t being told the whole truth,” I offer these three ideas as caution, admonition, and encouragement.
Foundation - Start where the apostles did.
Nothing we build, both literally and metaphorically, can survive without a solid base. Even Jesus talks about this in Matthew 7:24-27 (and Luke 6:46-49) when he compares the man who built his house on a rock versus the one who built his on sand (or no foundation). So when we read Paul’s words to the Corinthians, as he seeks to correct their starting points and basics on many different topics, we must heed this statement in particular:
11 For no one can lay any foundation other than what has been laid down. That foundation is Jesus Christ. (1 Cor. 3:11 CSB)
To take it even further, Paul spends the first part of 1 Corinthians 15 rehashing and restating the foundation as “the gospel I preached to you, which you received, on which you have taken your stand and by which you are being saved, if you hold to the message I preached to you—unless you believed in vain” (1 Cor. 15:1b-2 CSB).
Most of us would say that Christ is our foundation, no question. But look where your study hours go. If what you read in the Bible, listen to from podcasts, and spend late nights arguing about keeps circling the topics you think the church is “too scared” to preach, then that tells you what you’re really building on. What we spend the most time thinking about says more about what we believe than what we put in our Instagram bios.
Paul summed up this thought in one sentence: “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). Everything else, both in the letter and in our lives, hangs from that.
Filter - the center interprets the edges.
Jude shows how this works. He sat down to write about “our common salvation” (Jude 3), but went in a different direction. False teachers turned grace into an excuse and license to sin (Jude 4), which in turn gives us the letter we have now.
It gets strange real fast. In a short 25-verse book, we get angels who “abandoned their proper dwelling” (Jude 6), Michael the archangel arguing over Moses’ body with the devil (Jude 9), and a prophecy from Enoch (Jude 14-15). Genesis tells us that Enoch walked with God, but the words Jude quotes come from 1 Enoch, a non-canonical book so well known in those days that fragments of it were found at Qumran with the Dead Sea Scrolls. This suggests Jude was reaching for stories his audience already knew.
Where he brings them up in the letter matters. Every strange story is in the middle of his message. On one side, Jude calls his readers to contend for “the faith that was delivered to the saints once for all” (Jude 3), and on the other, he tells them to keep themselves in God’s love, “waiting expectantly for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ for eternal life” (Jude 21). The edges live inside the center, and Jude makes it clear that each has its own place.
We need this same order. The Bible no doubt has weird things in it, and they’re there for a reason. But we can only read them the right way when we read them through the person and work of Christ. Read Genesis 6 through Colossians 2:15, where Paul says Jesus “disarmed the rulers and authorities and disgraced them publicly,” and the sons of God become one more chapter in a story where God wins. Read the cross through Genesis 6, and Jesus becomes a side character in a cosmic thriller.
Jude knew his readers loved and held the Enoch stories closely, but he made extra sure they finished the letter looking at Jesus.
Fruit - speculation vs. stewardship.
Paul knew Timothy had this same problem in Ephesus. The apostle left his protégé there with one job: stop certain people from teaching strange things, which he names as “myths and endless genealogies.” The reason is that these “promote empty speculations rather than God’s plan, which operates by faith” (1 Tim. 1:4).
While we don’t know exactly what the “myths” were, the most likely candidates are the same kind of material the filled writings like 1 Enoch. Whatever they were fixating on, the Ephesian church found them more interesting and exciting than the Gospel. Sounds familiar, right?
Paul doesn’t refute the myths or even identify them. He goes to what fruit they bear. “Now the goal of our instruction is love that comes from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith” (1 Tim. 1:5). Some, he says, had wandered off into “fruitless discussion” (1:6). They wanted to teach people the Bible, but they actually couldn’t tell anyone what the Bible was for.
You may be thinking I’m saying, “Don’t study Genesis 6.” That’s not my point, because Jude did, and so did Peter in both his letters (1 Pet. 3:19-20 [likely], 2 Pet. 2:4-6). The question is what that study produces in you.
A healthy test is to ask yourself, “Do I love God more after studying X? Am I more patient with the people in my life? Do I want to share Jesus more after my research?”
If the real answer is no, then you’ve only become more interesting at parties. I know this firsthand because I’ve found myself down that Nephilim rabbit hole more than once.
Speculation feeds curiosity. Stewardship feeds people. Knowledge that never turns to love is just trivia with a Bible verse attached.
If you’re newer to this thing called faith, start with the center and stay there longer than feels exciting. Read one of the Gospels, finish it, then start it again. Read books like John Stott’s Basic Christianity to learn who Jesus is, why you need him, what he did, and how to respond. Ask someone who’s walked with Jesus longer than you to help you out. The weirder, secondary topics will still be there later. They’re not going anywhere anytime soon.
If you’ve been a believer for most of your life, this one’s for you too. New believers show up hungry as can be. They’ve finally beheld Jesus and his glory, and they’ll use their resources to search. If all they hear about these fringe topics is prohibition or warning, their algorithm will happily feed them the edges, Reel after Reel. You have a responsibility to be the person who reaches these younger Christians, in your church, with the center.
Even if you’re not a Christian, but have stuck it out this far, and think the stranger things about faith are interesting and something you want to research, follow the scent. Every one of them ends in the same place: a God who wins, and a cross where he did it. Start with Jesus, and see if the rest makes sense.
That first fall, I thought the difference between the guys who took me hunting and me was talent. But after a few seasons, I realized it was actually time at the range. Behind every successful harvest was someone who took their rifles, sat on a bench 100 yards away from a target, and shot until the rifle held zero. I learned this the expensive way, with a rifle that wouldn’t hold zero no matter which scope I mounted on it.
You can’t make a 300-yard shot with a rifle that can’t hold 100.
Get zeroed first, and the distance will come.