Open It Yourself

Somebody once looked at a whole country and decided that every child in it should be able to read.

Not the sons of the gentry. Not the boys with a future in the law. Every child, in every parish, including the ones from the cottages, including the girls, including the ones whose parents could not read the sign on their own front gate. A school in every parish. That was the plan, and it was written down at a time when the idea was close to absurd.

And the reason was not literacy. Literacy was the by-product.

The reason was that they had decided ordinary people should be able to open the book and see for themselves what it said. Not be told. See. Because a person who can only be told what the Word says is a person whose whole relationship with God runs through somebody else's memory of it, and those men had seen exactly what that does to a country over a few hundred years.

So they built schools. For that.

Now come and sit at a kitchen table with a woman four hundred years later.

She has a Bible. It was a gift. It has her name in the front in somebody else's handwriting. She can tell you a good deal of what is in it, and every single thing she can tell you, she got from a person. From a talk, from a study she attended, from a good man on a Sunday, from her mother.

And she has never once opened it on her own and read a page.

She has tried. Three or four times over the years she has sat down with it in her lap, opened it somewhere near the middle, read half a column, and thought: I do not know what this is doing. Then a second thought, arriving quickly behind the first, and this is the one that closed the book.

I am not the sort of person who reads this.

Not clever enough. Not trained. Not spiritual in the way the people who talk about it seem to be. Somebody has always told her what it says, and she has never checked, and by now the not-checking has hardened into a rule about who she is.

The book with her name in it sits on the shelf. Every word of it was written for somebody exactly like her.

They were called noble for checking

Now hear me, and hear the tone, because this is not a message against teachers.

I thank God for teachers. I thank God for the ones who studied so that we could hear it opened up, for scholars who spent decades on a language so a sentence could come across straight, for the good man on a Sunday who has never been thanked properly. Anybody who tells you to despise all that is handing you a poverty and calling it freedom.

That is not what I am doing.

I am telling you that you were also given eyes.

Look at what happened in a town called Berea. A traveling teacher comes through, and he is a considerable teacher, the sort of man whose name is on half the letters in the back of your Bible. And the people there listen to him eagerly, and then they go home and check him.

They received the word with all readiness, and searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so.Acts 17:11

And what does Scripture call them for that?

Noble.

Not arrogant. Not difficult. Not lacking respect for the man they had just listened to. The text goes out of its way to praise them, and the thing it praises is the going home and looking.

Notice they did both. They received it with readiness and they searched it. The receiving did not stop them looking, and the looking did not stop them receiving. That is the whole shape of a healthy person under teaching, and it is the shape you have never been given permission to have.

Because you are doing only the first half. You receive, gladly, and you have never once looked, and something in you has decided that looking is for a different class of person.

Beloved, if the searching had been reserved for the qualified, nobody would have called those Bereans noble. They would have called them presumptuous.

The word was put into ordinary hands on purpose. There have always been people who thought that was a mistake. There have always been others who built schools in every parish so that it could not be undone.

You are not too ordinary for this. You are exactly who it was for.

So hear this said over you, with a closed book on the arm of the chair. You are able to open this yourself and you have always been able, and checking what you are told against the page is the thing Scripture itself calls noble. That is written into a synagogue in Berea where people examined the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the teacher God put inside an ordinary reader.