Nobody Has To Go And Get It For You

Ten to six in the morning, and hers is the only kitchen light on in the street.

The Bible her aunt gave her is flat on the table, open at a page she landed on by accident, and she has read the same four lines twice. Something in the second one has gone straight through her. She could not tell you what it means. She could tell you that it felt like being spoken to by name.

So she reaches for her phone.

Not to ring anybody. To find out whether she is allowed to feel that.

Forty minutes later the tea has gone cold and she has watched most of a sermon by a man in another country, read half of somebody's study notes, and skimmed a page explaining what three scholars think one of the words is doing. All of it is good. None of it is wrong. Every one of those people loves God and worked hard so that she could have that sentence in her own language.

And the Bible is still lying open at the same page with nobody reading it.

She closes it at twenty past six, because the shower needs running and the day has started, and she has the odd flat feeling of somebody who ate in a restaurant while the meal she cooked went cold on her own table.

Here is why she was up at ten to six in the first place.

Three weeks ago her daughter moved out after a conversation that went wrong in about four sentences, and neither of them has found the way back since. She cannot pray about it in words. She has tried. What she wanted this morning was not information. She wanted God to say something to her, personally, in her kitchen, about her girl.

And something did. On the second line.

And she went and asked four other people whether it counted.

She has been doing this for thirty-one years.

Now I am going to stop saying she.

Because you know the exact motion. The page, then the phone. The feeling, then the search for permission to have had the feeling. You have a whole shelf of people you trust, and you should, and not one of them was in your room this morning, and you would not let the room speak until one of them had been fetched.

And underneath it, quiet and very old, is a sentence you have never once said out loud: this book is for people who know more than I do.

You are not lazy. You are not proud. You are reverent, actually. That is exactly what makes it so hard to see.

It is not up in the sky

Moses is at the end of everything. Forty years, a whole generation gone, and he is standing in front of a nation handing them a book and a border. And in the middle of it he says the strangest, kindest thing, and he says it like a man who can already hear what they are thinking.

This command I am giving you today is not too hard for you, and it is not far off. It is not up in the sky, so that you would say, who will go up to the sky for us and bring it back and make us hear it, so that we can do it? And it is not across the sea. No, the word is very near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it.Deuteronomy 30:11, 12, 13, 14

Read the sentence he puts in their mouths, because it is your sentence.

Who will go up for us, and get it, and make us hear it.

Notice that it does not sound like a bad sentence. It sounds humble. It sounds like somebody who thinks very highly of the word and very little of themselves, which is a combination the church has mistaken for holiness more than once. But look at what it actually does. It puts the word somewhere you cannot reach, and then it hires a runner.

And Moses will not have it. He answers the sentence before anyone has finished saying it.

It is not up there. It is not across the water. It is near you. It is in your mouth, and it is in your heart.

Two places, and He names them in that order on purpose: the part of you that speaks and the part of you that is spoken to. Between those two you are entirely accounted for. Not one word about the part of you with the qualification. That is what stands written, and His Spirit is the one who carries it into you.

Now hear me carefully, because there is a way of reading this that would cost you dearly.

Keep your teachers. Every single one of them. Keep the man in the other country whose sermon you watched at six in the morning. Keep the woman who taught you how to find the chapters. Keep the ones who spent thirty years inside a language you will never learn so that you could have one sentence of it in yours. God gave the church teachers on purpose and He has never once regretted it, and nobody here is asking you to hand a gift back. Nobody was meant to read alone forever. The whole point of a table is that it has more than one chair.

There was a man strangled and burned in 1536 for the crime of putting this book into English, and what he is remembered for saying is that he wanted a boy driving a plow to know more of it than the learned men did. Hear what he did not say. He did not say the boy should have no teacher. He said the boy should have a page.

That is the whole of what is being handed to you this morning. A page. Yours. In the language you dream in, at your own table, with nobody standing between you and it.

And here is what that ploughboy had that nobody could take off him. The One who breathed it lives in the people who love Him. You are not decoding a dead letter and hoping you have got it right. You are reading your Father's own words with your Father in the room, and He is not irritated by your questions, and He is not waiting for you to get the Greek right first. He has been trying to get a word to you about your daughter for three weeks. He has been using the plainest method He owns, which is His word in your hands and His Spirit in the room.