Deep Learning

B and me

Over the last 3-4 years I’ve studied how people learn in order to apply learning theory to faith and discipleship. The paragraphs that follow are excerpted from Rigorous Grace, my most recent book. If you haven’t done so already, you can purchase the book here.

Rigorous Grace is a book written to prepare you to live spiritually as your heart desires and walk with God as He designed and equipped you to do throughout all your days, all your ways, and in spite of whatever discouragement and duress you encounter.

The Bible has things to say about your physical wellbeing and preparation to live a healthy life. But much more common in Scripture is exhortation for how to prepare your mind as a Believer. “Set your mind,” Paul writes. “Practice,” he says in Philippians. “Train yourself for godliness,” he writes to Timothy. “Practice” to discern, Hebrews says.[1]

Life is primarily a mind game. Knowing God is a desire of the heart. Passion fuels each. Discipline and the practice to habituate it develops those patterns that guide your walk with Christ and create resiliency in life.

In his book about learning, David Epstein[2] discovered that in order to learn deeply, failure is essential. What Epstein means by deep learning is contrasted against regular learning. Deep learning is resilient and flexible, he says. By resilient he means learning that doesn’t wither, waffle, or falter when under duress. By flexible, he means learning with sufficient insight and mastery that you can apply what you’ve learned in various and unrelated environments. But you don’t get deep learning without suffering failure.

Is this registering for you? Are you correlating this yet to your faith and life?

Recall that Jesus Christ, even though He was God’s Son, “learned obedience from the things which He suffered.”[3] And wow! Was it ever important that Jesus had a deep learning of obedience and understanding about His Father, God. What would have happened—to you, to me, to us—if Jesus’ obedience had failed in the Garden of Gethsemane?

The goal of the Christian life, at least as far as your heavenly Father is concerned, is not to get it right but to learn His ways and who He is. You have been made right by your redemption and sanctification in Christ. What you may not possess, however, is the deep learning that can be yours as a disciple of Jesus Christ.

To be clear, I’m not talking about the kinds of things you learn from a sermon or by reading a book. I’m talking about learning that is honed and developed through the stress and failures you suffer in life throughout your days. When life takes an irregular turn, the inevitable accusation Satan makes is that God has abandoned you, is not doing right by you, or that your faith is irrelevant to the situation causing you angst. It is essential that you learn deeply who God is, who you are, and how your relationship works. Although you may pray for deliverance—and God certainly hears your prayer—routine rescue as a remedy for hardship is the worst thing God could do for you. You will never learn God’s ways and construct an enduring faith apart from struggle.

In studying deep learning, Robin Hogarth identified two environments in which learning occurs: “kind” and “wicked.”[4]

A kind environment is one where patterns repeat and feedback is accurate and rapid. A wicked environment is one in which the rules of the game are not clear or are incomplete, there may or may not be repeating patterns, and they may or may not be obvious. Feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both. It’s not uncommon in some wicked learning environments for experience to reinforce the exact wrong lessons.

Now, think about your life. Think about raising your kids, managing illness, aging parents, the insurance company that won’t pay, the financial loss, the irregularity of our national schisms, what your kids are learning in school, soaring crime rates…. You do not live in a kind environment. 

Life is a wicked environment.

What are you learning? How are you learning? What are you developing, changing, modifying in order to bring your faith to bear upon the wicked environment in which you live?

When the Bible speaks about “disciplining yourself,” it’s not necessarily exhorting you to acquire more biblical insight. Certainly biblical content and information are important, but unless what you conceptually know is tempered into deep learning, there is a high probability that in the wicked environment of life your faith may be found lacking in power, relevance, or applicability when the inevitable demands of this life close in around you. In a wicked environment, a kind faith is vulnerable to a God who is accused of being distant, disengaged, irrelevant, or even petty and capricious.

But in contrast, in a wicked environment where your faith is forged into deep learning, you and your walk of faith prove not only resilient and flexible as Epstein discovered, you are also powerful and threatening to the dark kingdom and its minions. Oorah! I just heard Cash growling in my head, “Stand me up at the gates of hell, but I won’t back down.”

Learning forms habits and habits reinforce learning—it’s a compounding dynamic. As you read, and ponder, and seek to apply the practices that follow, I encourage you to pray and ask your heavenly Father to show you whose you are, what you believe, what your habits are, and where change needs to begin in order to realize your heart’s desire. The top priority in God’s list of pressing matters is His relationship with you and yours with Him. Everything else pales in comparison to His future with you. This means that when you pray the prayer I’m suggesting, God leaps to answer and take you at your word. So, speak with your heavenly Father about the practices that follow.

This concludes the excerpt. If you would like to purchase the book, you can do so here.

Housekeeping: a) Please pray about the ebook for Rigorous Grace. Lindsay and I are having a fit trying to get this version of the book to appear at Amazon. Not even Amazon seems to know what’s preventing the ebook from being available. I suspect I know—and that’s why I am asking you to pray. b) Thank you for your patience while I have been away from my keyboard. While my writing production is customarily slower during the summer, I’m back and rejuvenated. c) I’m prepping to go on the hunt for a web developer skilled in web design and structure, i.e., the “back end of a website.” Given the cancel shenanigans of MailChimp.com, et al, there is nothing to do but reconstruct both lifetime.org and prestongillham.com. This is not a simple redesign, so I need to find just the right individual for this project. I appreciate in advance your prayers.

Keep your wits about you. These are odd, weird, dangerous, and irregular days. But! These are the days for which we are built as the children of God.

[1] Colossians 3:2; Philippians 4:8-9; 1 Timothy 4:7; Hebrews 5:12.

[2] Epstein, David. Range. Riverhead Books. New York, NY. 2019.

[3] Cf.: Hebrews 5:8.

[4] Hogarth, Robin. Educating Intuition. University of Chico Press. Chicago, IL. 2001.