Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Back to school appeared on my radar with the arrival of commercials for Trapper Keeper binders, Five Star notebooks, and Bic pens. My mom would start talking about going shopping for school clothes. Though school began in August, fall was only fully formed when the leaves began to change and the scent of autumn and football season filled the air.

This was a time of hope, a moment of possibility. It was a time of new and old friends, of forgotten failures and fresh opportunities. It was a chance to dream of what I might one day become. This fueled my desire to learn, grow, and pursue the vision in my head and heart for my life. Suffice it to say that I loved going back to school.

Of course, not everyone shares this romanticized view. Bruce Springsteen certainly didn’t seem to join me in my love for school in his song “No Surrender”:

Well, we busted out of class
Had to get away from those fools
We learned more from a three-minute record, baby
Than we ever learned in school.

Whether you’re like me and found magic in fresh notebooks and new beginnings, or you’re like Springsteen and learned life’s most important lessons outside the classroom walls, September can still carry that unmistakable energy of transformation. What matters is not how you feel about school, but what you choose to do with the sense of possibility that autumn always brings.

Back to school with God

This new season gives us inspiration about how to engage in our relationship with God. Enrolling in his classroom makes all other learning possible.

Wise people want to learn more, so they listen closely to gain knowledge.

Proverbs 18:15 ERV

The spiritually wise are those who realize how much more they need to learn. For anyone who believes in God, this means always learning more and listening closely to his Word to better understand how to be close to him. Revelation 2 offers the ultimate spiritual back-to-school assessment:

“I know your deeds, your tireless labor, and your patient endurance. I know you do not tolerate those who do evil. Furthermore, you have diligently tested those who claim to be emissaries, and you have found that they are not true witnesses. You have correctly found them to be false. I know you are patiently enduring and holding firm on behalf of My name. You have not become faint. However, I have this against you: you have abandoned your first love. Do you remember what it was like before you fell? It’s time to rethink and change your ways; go back to how you first acted. However, if you do not return, I will come quickly and personally remove your lampstand from its place.”

Revelation 2:2-5 Voice

As Jesus addresses Christians in these verses, he brings forward the most important subject we can learn: loving and desiring a relationship with God. This first love is the catalyst that makes our second love possible: loving people.

Many of us know the rules, but stop knowing God. In Revelation 2, Jesus describes a people who had “tireless labor,” “patient endurance,” and “intolerance to evil.” But his concern was that they had mastered the curriculum while losing the Teacher. That’s when love fades, and that autumn feeling of possibility turns into just another routine. We stop looking for ways to learn to love and settle for religious behavior. We act as though we’ve graduated from God’s classroom.

The writer of Hebrews warned about this very danger:

We have much to say about this, but it is hard to make it clear to you because you no longer try to understand. In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.

Hebrews 5:11-14 NIV

Many Christians graduate too soon—they stop studying God and stop wrestling with Scripture. They become dull to learning because they think they’ve heard it all before.

The moment we stop learning, we stop loving. People don’t leave God and lose their faith for lack of knowing the rules. They leave because they stop learning about their first love—God.

In today’s edition of The Chemistry Lab, let’s enter God’s classroom and discover the two loves God is always trying to teach us about: loving him, and loving people.

The first love: God

Loving God begins with changing how we “boast.” Rather than boasting in our talents, connections, backgrounds, or any other human ability, we should instead value knowing God:

“This is what the Lord says: ‘Let not the wise boast of their wisdom or the strong boast of their strength or the rich boast of their riches, but let the one who boasts boast about this: that they have the understanding to know me, that I am the Lord, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight,’ declares the Lord.”

Jeremiah 9:23-24 NIV

When we read the Bible, it should be to get to know God—to hear his voice, know his heart, understand his purposes, feel his emotions, and experience his love. This is how we establish the chemistry that changes everything else in our lives. Our understanding of God moves us to rely on him and his power to do whatever he lays on our hearts.

Too many people settle for reading the Bible as a rule book rather than a relationship book. Our morning quiet times or devotionals become about fixing behavior, not about growing in our relationship with God. Eventually, we stop reading altogether, because we think we’ve mastered all the rules. But the real test is: do I still love God enough to want to learn?

When we’ve stopped learning, we must change to regain, ignite, intensify, or deepen our love for God. This is why Jesus says:

“The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”

John 6:29 NIV

The spiritual work God wants us to do is to believe in him. The work is not learning the rules but learning the relationship. “Back to school” means going back to God as our first subject—knowing him, believing in him, and learning about him daily. It means we never stop praying and asking him questions. We never stop learning how to read the Bible, which includes reading the parts that comfort and inspire, but also those that overwhelm, confuse, challenge, or even scare us.

These elements of the Bible that challenge us are opportunities to learn; they reveal parts of God that we need to know better. We will be unable to grow in our understanding of God if we pick and choose what we read in order to manipulate his voice to suit our desires. This means when we open the Bible, we must choose to let God be in control of what he teaches us.

Loving God means wanting to know and believe in all of what he has to tell us — not just certain parts.

Do you love God? Do you feel his presence in your life? If so, how do you increase it? If not, how do you ignite it?

The second love: People

Jesus replied: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’This is the first and greatest commandment. ³⁹And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.'”

Matthew 22:38-39 (NIV)

These verses are often quoted but rarely connected. Jesus made it clear that our love for God and our love for people are inseparable. What this means is that if we fail to love God, we won’t have the capacity to love people. We can’t pass “Love of People 101” if we’ve dropped “Love of God 101.” God’s love for us gives us the internal strength to love others. The apostle Paul understood this and explained it further in the book of Ephesians:

I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:16-19 NIV

As we learn to love God, we open the door to experience his love for us. And when we experience his perfect love, something powerful happens:

Such love has no fear, because perfect love expels all fear. If we are afraid, it is for fear of punishment, and this shows that we have not fully experienced his perfect love.

1 John 4:18 NLT

Fear—of rejection, failure, or painful emotion—holds us back from loving others. The love of God expels all fear, which enables us to love people not only in the easy seasons but also in the difficult ones. It’s why Jesus said loving others would be the distinguishing mark of his followers:

“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

John 13:34-35 NIV

Jesus’s standard is radical, sacrificial love:

“My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

John 15:12-13 NIV

Back to school means checking our relational report card: Am I interested and patient? Am I forgiving and enduring? Or am I unfaithful, distracted, superficial, and selfish?

Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.

1 John 4:20-21 NIV

Love for God is the foundation. Love for people is the proof. This is why loving God is so pivotal in our ability to love people—it’s the only way we can fulfill what the Bible teaches. It’s also how we build lasting friendships that help us grow in all seasons.

The relationship overflow: The four friends

Something to think about: many of us are experiencing change as autumn arrives. We are going back to school, back to work after vacation, or returning to regular routines. Ahead are possibilities but also problems, tremendous opportunities but also temptations, things that will make us determined as well as things that will make us doubt.

This is where friendships come in. What life has taught me is that if we embrace the two loves we’ve discussed, we end up having not only God walking with us but also friends.

I have many stories about the friends who have saved me and gotten me through the seasons of life, which you can read about in my book, He’s Not Who You Think He Is. What I’ve found is that we always need each of the below four types of friends (or we need to be that friend for someone else):

1. The Initiator: Someone who chooses people over distractions (Luke 10:38–42)
2. The Creator – Someone who loves people, not things (1 John 2:15–17)
3. The Connector – Someone who clears selfishness to love deeply (1 Peter 1:22)
4. The Searcher – Someone who sacrifices opportunity for people (2 Corinthians 2:12–13)

Our team developed visual cards for each of these friendships that you can save and carry with you into your season of change:

These four friendships are simply what develop in our lives when the love of God overflows into love for people:

Is there any encouragement from belonging to Christ? Any comfort from his love? Any fellowship together in the Spirit? Are your hearts tender and compassionate? [2] Then make me truly happy by agreeing wholeheartedly with each other, loving one another, and working together with one mind and purpose. [3] Don’t be selfish; don’t try to impress others. Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourselves. [4] Don’t look out only for your own interests, but take an interest in others, too. [5] You must have the same attitude that Christ Jesus had.

Philippians 2:1-5 NLT

As we go back to school, let’s not only build an extraordinary relationship with God—let’s find four friends with whom we can build extraordinary relationships. Do this, and I guarantee you’ll begin looking forward to autumn and going back to school as much as I do.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.” And when we get our loves right—first God, then people—we discover that every new season really is a chance to begin again.

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