I Have Never Read It Cold

Marcia has been in that Thursday group for eleven years and she is good at it.

She is the one who says the helpful thing. Not the loudest, and not the one with the commentary open on her lap, but the one who waits until the conversation has gone round twice and then puts a sentence into the middle of it that makes three people write something down.

Pauline runs it, and Pauline is excellent. The sheet comes out on Tuesday: the passage, a paragraph of background, and three questions. It is good work and it takes her about two hours a week and she has been doing it since before her husband died.

Marcia reads the sheet.

She reads the paragraph of background first, always, and then the passage, and by the time she is at verse three she already knows what it is about, because Pauline has told her at the top of the page in two sentences that are almost always right.

Eleven years.

And what Marcia realized this spring, sitting at her kitchen table on a Thursday afternoon with a mug going cold beside her, is that she has never once opened a passage before somebody told her what it says.

Not once. Not in eleven years, and probably not before that either.

Pauline had a chest infection. Somebody put a message in the group on the Wednesday: no sheet this week, sorry, just have a look at Philippians 2 and we will talk it through.

Just have a look at it.

Marcia sat down with Philippians 2 open in front of her at four in the afternoon and did not know how to start.

Not the words. She could read every word. She read the whole chapter twice and understood all of it in the way you understand a paragraph in a newspaper, and then sat there with a completely blank page and the specific, hot embarrassment of a competent woman who has just found out she has been leaning on something for a decade.

She said, out loud, to an empty kitchen, "I have never read it cold."

Now let me be very careful about what this article is going to do with that, because there is an obvious wrong turn here and I am not taking it.

The sheet is not the problem. Pauline is not the problem.

The guide and the man on the road

There is a scene in Acts where a man is reading out loud in a chariot and does not understand what he is reading.

He is a treasury official from Ethiopia, a serious man on a long journey home, and he has a scroll of Isaiah, which means money, because those did not circulate cheaply. He is reading it aloud, which is how everybody read then. And Philip is told to go and run alongside.

And Philip ran up and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet, and said, "Do you understand what you are reading?" And he said, "Well, how could I, unless someone guides me?" And he invited Philip to come up and sit with him.Acts 8:30 to 31

Now read what that passage actually does, because it does two things at once and most people only quote one of them.

How could I, unless someone guides me? That is a full endorsement of the guide. The man is not embarrassed and the text is not embarrassed for him. He needs help, he says so plainly, and God has already sent somebody down that road for exactly this. The teacher in this story is God's idea.

And underneath that: he was already reading it.

Nobody gave him the passage. Nobody told him what it was about first. He was in a chariot on the Gaza road working his way through Isaiah 53 out loud on his own, and it was that, the reading he was already doing cold, that Philip ran up alongside.

Philip did not bring him the text. He arrived in the middle of it.

So hear this said over you, at a kitchen table with a blank page and a chapter you have read twice. You are entirely able to meet this book before anybody frames it for you, and eleven years of good sheets have not taken that from you, they have simply never asked for it. That is written into a man on a road who was reading before the teacher arrived, and it is the Holy Spirit who is described as the teacher inside an ordinary person, and He was the one who put Philip on that road in the first place.

Now let me guard the group, because I said I would.

Study is not a crutch. A woman who prepares a sheet for two hours a week for a decade is doing one of the most loving and unglamorous things anybody in a church does, and the paragraph at the top of that page is nearly always right, and it is right because she went and found out.

There is a whole tradition behind this: a movement five hundred years ago that thought so highly of ordinary people reading that it built a school in every parish, and thought so highly of teaching that it trained ministers to a standard that took years. Those two convictions are the same conviction. They put the book in your hands and they gave you somebody to sit beside you in the chariot, and they never once thought those were in competition.

So the problem is not the sheet.

The problem is the order.

You read the paragraph first. Every time, for eleven years. And so the passage has never once arrived in your hands as itself, unlabeled, with you not knowing yet what it is about, which is the only condition under which a person notices anything.

Nobody chose that. It is just what happens when the sheet is good and it comes on a Tuesday.

So take that again, plainly. You are able to meet a page before anybody has framed it, and you have had that in you since long before the Thursday group existed. It is written into a man on the Gaza road reading Isaiah out loud with nobody yet beside him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives the sense of it inside an ordinary reader.

And here is the thing that will cost you something to hear: you are not underqualified. You are the one who says the sentence that makes three people write something down. That is a reader's instinct and you have had it the whole time, and you have been running it on somebody else's opening move.

The Word says His word is a lamp to the feet, which is a light for the person walking, not a light for the person explaining the road. And the Spirit of God is the one who searches the deep things and makes them known, and the New Testament says He does that in believers rather than only through experts.