Be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, accurately handling the word of truth. –II Timothy 2.15
For a long time, I’ve thought of reading and doing theology as an act of sanctification and discipleship. How else is the Christian supposed to act rightly (orthopraxis) without knowing rightly (orthodoxy)? These are bound together in a dialectical bundle whilst the one implicates the other, and vice versa. In short: without the work of prayerful and worshipful study before God there cannot be any Christian growth. When the disciple does a word study of the word translated ‘accurately handling’ what the student will notice is that this word entails toiling. That is to say, if the Christian, who are priests of God in and through participation and union with Christ’s priesthood for us (pro nobis), are going to ‘grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ’ (see the papal theology of the Petrine, Peter), this will involve a toiling work of engaging with Holy Scripture; indeed, with its res (reality), Jesus Christ.
With the aforementioned, what I am pressing is that the Christian existence does not ‘just happen’; there is no magic in the Kingdom of Christ. The Christian is called to separation unto God, in and through the separation unto God that Christ is for us, whilst in these fallen bodies (Rom. 7). In short, it takes real life daily and constant work if the Christian is really going to grow in a relationship with the triune God. The Kingdom is not cradled by a baby’s milk, but by the meat of the Holy Sanctuary of God as that is constantly provided for us by the One who, at the Right Hand, is constantly living to make intercession for us. As those who are constantly being given over to the death of Christ, that the life of Christ might also be made manifest through the mortal members of our bodies, we are beholden as slaves of God in Christ to stand in the power of God in Christ’s might, and take every thought captive unto the obedience of Christ; indeed, as this is prayerfully and worshipfully undertaken in a submission to the Logos of God. It is in this condition that the Christian might strive to grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ. That is from the loving obedience of the Son before the Father by the Holy Spirit for us.
The moral of this is that the Western church, by and large, remains weak because it is primarily populated by lazy people; that is, in regard to putting in the work to know and grow in a knowledge of God in Jesus Christ.