The Parts I Was Told Were Mine

The list is on a piece of card, in blue biro, in handwriting that is not his.

A man called Sam wrote it out for him eleven years ago at a kitchen table, after Keoni had told him what had happened to him on a Thursday night and had asked, quite genuinely, so what do I do now?

And Sam, who was kind and was not a scholar and never claimed to be, said, start here.

Then he wrote a list. One Gospel. A couple of letters. Some psalms. He said something like this will keep you going for a good while, and he was completely right, and it did.

Keoni still has the card. It lives inside the front cover.

He also still reads the list.

Eleven years. He is not exaggerating and he checked. There are large parts of that book he has never opened as an adult believer, not once, and if you laid it flat you could see the difference in the paper.

It is not that he thinks the rest is forbidden. He would laugh if you said that. If you asked him directly he would say of course it is all for everybody.

But something else has been running underneath the words he would say. Somewhere in him, the card became the shape of what is his. The list is the part with his name on it, and the rest is the part that belongs to people who understand it: the ones who can hold the long histories in their heads, the ones who can explain the strange chapters, the ones at the front.

He noticed it in June because of a funeral.

Somebody read out something at the graveside that Keoni had never heard in his life, and it took the top of his head off, and he stood there in the sun holding his hat and thinking what was that?

And then he went home and looked it up and found it was in a part of the book that was not on the card.

Eleven years, and a stranger at a funeral had to hand him a sentence that had been sitting in his own house the whole time.

And you might have your own card, and yours may not be written down anywhere, and it may still be running your reading eleven years later.

All of it was breathed out, and all of it is for use

Take this off before we go any further, because you have been carrying it for eleven years and it was never handed to you.

You are not a guest in most of that book. You never were. Scripture says of itself that the whole of it is breathed out and useful, and it is the Holy Spirit, not your reading level or your years, who makes any part of it land in a person. Set that down here at the end of the dock. It is heavy and it has kept you living on one card.

Now hear how the book describes its own extent, because the sentence is unusually sweeping.

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.2 Timothy 3:16

All. Not the accessible parts. Not the parts people put on cards for beginners.

And notice the purpose given: so that an ordinary servant would be thoroughly equipped. Thoroughly. Which is a word that assumes access to the whole of it, because you cannot be thoroughly anything on an extract.

You have the whole of it. Right now, sitting where you are, with the card still in the front cover. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who breathed it out in the first place, and He did not breathe some of it for you and the rest for other people.

Now let me be careful here, because there is a ditch and I am not putting you in it.

Sam did a good thing. That card was not a fence, it was a doorway, and giving a new believer somewhere to start is one of the kindest things anybody can do. Nothing in this message is a complaint about him, and if he is still around you should thank him.

And the ones who can hold the long histories, who know the strange chapters, who can tell you what a passage meant to the people who first heard it, are a real gift. A man who reads the hard parts entirely alone, listening to nobody, will end up with strange certainties and no one to check them. Take their help. Take it gladly.

But a starting point that never got revisited becomes a boundary, and nobody has to intend that for it to happen.

Here is the tender part, and I will say it straight because you are a straight man. What has kept you on the card is not laziness and it is not fear of difficulty. You work hard at difficult things every day of your life. It is not what Scripture says about you either, and His Spirit has never once ranked a man out of a chapter.

It is a quiet sense that the rest of it is somebody else's inheritance and you are being appropriate by staying in your lane.

You are not staying in your lane. You are standing outside a house you own. Scripture says all of it is breathed out and useful for equipping an ordinary servant thoroughly, and the same Spirit who breathed it is in you, and He has never once looked at a man in a doorway and thought not that room, that one is for the others.

And the honest half. Eleven years is a long time to be handed one of your own sentences by a stranger at a graveside.