Well, I'm sure that got your attention!  I'm strongly for people attending seminary, but there is a trap I fell into while studying apologetics that I hope I can help all of you seminarians avoid as you're studying the truths of God this year.

Here's what happened:  the subjects I studied gave me incredible joy; thinking about God and His fingerprints on the world was (and is) so deeply satisfying, and it was important to me to take in as much as I could since everything I learned was opening up new opportunities to explain the truth about God to people at work.  But then, as studying took more and more of my time, I began to spend less and less intimate time with God.  I couldn't keep up with everything, and I made the mistake of assuming that taking in edifying information and using it to serve God was the same as spending time alone with Him.  Thinking my spiritual bases were covered, I increasingly exchanged the second activity for the first. This mistake eventually led me into the most spiritually miserable time of my life. 

What I didn't realize was this:  when I thought about God for the purposes of school, I was taking in information and sorting it--all the while thinking about how I would use that information effectively--then sending it on its way through the proper channels.  My focus was on serving others.  This is a good thing, but very different from settling down and opening up my heart to God, allowing him to shape me without the constant thoughts in my head about how I'm planning to pass the information on to others.  I needed to be humble, quiet, and open before God and His Word with no other agenda--just me and Him with nowhere to hide.

As it turned out, though studying theology and apologetics did increase my excitement and love for God when I also had that close time with Him, it couldn't sustain me without it.  Strangely, I had let that time go because it seemed selfish and, I'm embarrassed to say, unproductive to simply enjoy God.  Everything turned around when, starving for God, I finally understood where I had gone wrong.

Recently, I came across a quote by George Müller (cited by John Piper in Desiring God) that expresses well what I found to be true:

I saw more clearly than ever, that...the first thing to be concerned about was not, how much I might serve the Lord, how I might glorify the Lord; but how...my inner man might be nourished.  For I might seek to set the truth before the unconverted, I might seek to benefit believers, I might seek to relieve the distressed, I might in other ways seek to behave myself as it becomes a child of God in this world; and yet, not being happy in the Lord, and not being nourished and strengthened in my inner man day by day, all this might not be attended to in a right spirit...

Now I saw, that the most important thing I had to do was to give myself to the reading of the Word of God and to meditation on it...searching, as it were, into every verse, to get blessing out of it; not for the sake of the public ministry of the Word; not for the sake of preaching on what I had meditated upon; but for the sake of obtaining food for my own soul...

Thus also the Lord is pleased to communicate unto me that which, very soon after, I have found to become food for other believers, though it was not for the sake of the public ministry of the Word that I gave myself to meditation, but for the profit of my own inner man.

May none of you ever lose sight of this!