This week on Things Unseen, I want to think about a subject that may have bored you in elementary school, and perhaps it still bores you today.

But it is actually enormously important.

And I want us to think about how important it is in the

school of Jesus Christ. Well, what's that, you might ask? Well, it's the rules of grammar.

What's grammar? Well, here's how the multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary defines it.

Grammar is that department of the study of a language which deals with its inflectional forms or other means of indicating the relation of words in the sentence, and with the rules for employing

these in accordance with established usage.

Well, now you might think I'm just confusing you.

But that's just a technical way of saying this.

Grammar is about how the language we use actually works.

If you've ever had to learn a foreign language,

then you'll know that every language has its own grammar. And one of the first challenges for us may be discovering that the way that other language

works is different from the way our own language works.

So in order to speak it properly, to make sense, you've got to follow the rules of its grammar.

Now most of us at first learn grammar, not from textbooks, but as we grow up from listening

to others speak, by a kind of osmosis.

And the same is true in the Christian life.

Because my point is, the Christian gospel has its own grammar.

But it's a foreign language to the natural man.

By nature, we speak another language and use a different grammar.

And the more we use it, the more natural and actually the more right it seems to us.

And as a result, we're not able to understand the language of the gospel. Remember how Paul says this when he writes to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians chapter 2,

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