You can quote Keller. You’ve got a firm stance on penal substitution. You’ve taken in so much Bible-adjacent content that you’re one algorithm tweak away from launching your own theology podcast. And yet—for all that knowledge—your soul feels…restless. The guilt still simmers. The anger still flashes. Your relationships are still fragile. And when you finally slow down, it’s hard to tell whether you’re becoming more like Jesus or just getting better at talking about Him.
It’s a modern spiritual dilemma: mistaking theological literacy for spiritual maturity.
N.T. Wright has seen it firsthand. “The Bible,” he says, “used to be the book that everybody possessed but nobody read.”
Now, we might be reading it—but often as content consumers, not transformed participants. We devour Scripture the way we binge a prestige drama: attentive, maybe even moved, but still mostly passive.
“If you learn how to read the Bible,” Wright says, “the Bible will help you to get where you need to be. Because the Bible is basically the Jesus book.”
That’s the key. The point of Scripture isn’t to become an expert in Scripture. It’s to be re-formed into the kind of person Jesus was—and is. It’s to inhabit a different story than the one our culture keeps trying to sell us.
“Here is a world,” Wright says, “a world which can be yours to live in. A world which is God’s world, which is the world of the God who made the world and made you.”
But that world is not built on content absorption. It’s shaped by slow, disruptive transformation.
“I went through a phase where I was obsessed with Bible study,” says 26-year-old Jess, who attends a popular young adult church in Atlanta. “I had three different study Bibles, color-coded highlighters and was doing word studies in the original Hebrew. But I was still petty, self-absorbed and avoiding the hard conversations God was nudging me toward.”
It’s easy to confuse familiarity with intimacy. But transformation takes more than content—it takes surrender. You can Greek-parse your way through the Gospels and still ghost your roommate. You can recite the entire Romans Road and still use people as a means to an end. And you can do your “quiet time” every morning and still panic every time life doesn’t go the way you planned.
Real growth has a cost. It demands more than knowledge—it requires action. As Dr. Esau McCaulley puts it, “The test of good theology is how it plays out in our embodied lives—especially in how we relate to the marginalized and hurting.”
This is where a lot of us stall out. We’ve got the framework. We’ve got the words. But when the rubber meets the road—when the Spirit whispers something inconvenient or countercultural or actually hard—we default to more study. More podcasts. Another sermon series. Anything but movement.
Wright reminds us that Scripture is not just about Jesus—it’s saturated with Him. “The whole New Testament is interpreting the whole of Israel’s scriptures in relation to Jesus, and interpreting Jesus in relation to the whole of Israel’s scriptures. So, in a sense, if you’ve got Jesus, you’ve got the whole Bible.”
The reverse is also true: if you’re studying the Bible and becoming less like Jesus, something’s off.
And that misalignment isn’t always obvious. Sometimes it looks like discipline. Sometimes it looks like faithfulness. But if your theology makes you more anxious, more self-righteous or more numb, you’re not being transformed—you’re just being distracted.
“There are strange things when we think about it,” Wright says. “The early disciples of Jesus didn’t have what we call the New Testament. They had their memories of Jesus. They had the Holy Spirit. And they had a much better knowledge of the Old Testament than almost any of us will ever have.”
The goal was never intellectual mastery. It was Christlikeness. Not the aesthetic kind. The actual, gritty, self-emptying kind. The kind that reshapes your friendships, your spending, your politics, your posture toward people who annoy you. The kind that doesn’t always make sense until you live it.
So maybe it’s time to stop asking, “What did I learn today?” and start asking, “Who am I becoming?”
Look for fruit, not just facts. Galatians 5 spells it out—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Not “solid exegesis” or “thought-provoking analysis.” Those things are fine. But they are not the goal.
You don’t need more resources. You need more surrender. You don’t need another clever take. You need the Spirit to mess with your priorities.
The Bible isn’t a book to conquer. It’s a world to live in. And if we let it, it can still change us—not into people who know more about Jesus, but into people who look like Him.
