I wonder how often I've settled for someone else's understanding of God instead of going to the Source and gaining understanding for myself.

I had this picture in my mind of a city preparing for a storm.

Not just an ordinary storm, but one you couldn't evacuate from. You knew it was coming, you knew you were going to have to live through it, and a meeting had been called to teach everyone in the city what they needed to know to survive.

The instructor had the information you needed, and the meeting had a start time. But you showed up late.

By the time you arrived, the instructor had already covered part of the material, so you started asking the people around you what you had missed.

One person told you what they remembered. Another told you what stood out to them. Someone else explained what they thought the instructor meant, while another person had heard the exact same teaching and understood it differently.

You asked five people and got five different answers.

None of them were necessarily trying to mislead you. They were simply giving you what they had received and understood.

But you still didn't have what the instructor actually taught.

And this wasn't information about something that didn't matter. A storm was coming.

I started thinking about how easily we can do the same thing with God.

We listen to sermons, read books, watch teachings and devotionals, and ask friends what they think a Scripture means. Now we can open our phones and have someone explain almost any passage to us within seconds.

There is nothing wrong with learning from other people. God uses teachers, pastors, authors and the people around us to help us grow, but their understanding was never meant to replace our own time with the Source.

I can tell you what I learned when I sat with a Scripture, but I'm still telling you what I noticed. I can share what God showed me through something I've lived, but you're hearing it through my experience.

At some point, you still have to go sit with the Instructor yourself.

It made me think differently about Proverbs 4:7: “Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding.”

I don't just want information about God. I don't want to know Him only through what someone else understood about Him. I want to open His Word myself, ask questions, sit long enough to listen, and wrestle with the things I don't understand instead of immediately asking someone else to tell me what they mean.

Because storms do come, and when I'm standing in one, I don't want my relationship with God to be built entirely from pieces of what everyone around me heard at the meeting.

I want to know the Source for myself.