He Is the One Who Opens It

The radiator under the window in Deborah's front room makes a sound like somebody tapping a spoon on a pipe, twice, and then stops for eleven minutes, and everyone who comes on a Wednesday has learned to talk over it.

Seven of them tonight, in a ring of chairs that never quite makes a circle. Mugs on the chair arms. A plate of the biscuits nobody chooses. They are going round the room reading a verse each, the way they have done for years, and it moves clockwise, which means Deborah gets the fourth one.

She reads it. Her voice is fine. It is a good verse and she reads it well, because she has been reading out loud in this room since her hair was a different color, and she knows to slow down at the comma.

And what she hears while she is doing it is her own voice. That is all. A woman in her forties in a warm room saying eleven words that used to go through her like the first cold morning of October, and now they are eleven words, and Kenneth is already reading the next one.

You know that ten seconds.

You have your own version of it and you have never described it to anybody, because there is no sentence for it that does not sound ungrateful. It is not doubt. You would defend every word of it in a car park at midnight. It is not neglect either. You are still reading, still turning up, still saying the amen at the end of somebody else's prayer. It is that the page has gone quiet, and you have started to suspect that the quiet is a verdict on you.

Two men on a road, and neither of them knew

There is a walk in the Gospels I want you to see properly, because most of us have only ever been shown the end of it.

Two men, seven miles, one bad afternoon. Everything they had believed for three years had been publicly finished on a Friday and they were going home. A stranger falls in with them and starts explaining the Scriptures, and they listen for hours, and they still do not know who He is. Not a flicker of recognition. Their eyes were held, Luke says, and they were held the whole way.

Now sit with that. Something was happening in them, real enough that they said so afterwards, and while it was happening they could not identify it and could not have manufactured it and did not know they were being warmed.

They said to each other, "Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?"Luke 24:32

They only said that in the past tense. In the moment, it was a long walk with a stranger and a lot to think about.

You are being spoken to on a road you have not recognized as a road. I am not making that up to be kind to you: the written account has Christ Himself doing the explaining while the two men felt nothing they could name, and it is the same Spirit at work in your front room on a Wednesday. What you can identify has never been the measure of what He is doing.

Notice whose hands were on the latch

Then look at what Luke says a few lines later, when they are all back together in the upper room and He is standing among them.

He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures. He opened them. Not they studied harder, not they applied themselves, not they finally got their hearts right and the meaning came through. The verb belongs to Him in both places: He opened the Scriptures on the road and He opened their minds in the room.

Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.Luke 24:45

That is the whole relocation I want to make with you tonight. You have a Bible that God Himself opens, and the warming was never something you were generating. His word says the entrance of His words gives light, which means the light comes in with the word rather than out of the reader, and His Spirit is the one who carries it across the gap between a page and a person. You are not the ignition. You never were, not even in the years when you thought you were rather good at this.

That should come as relief and not as a demotion. If the burning had been your product, then a flat winter would be a manufacturing fault and you would be the factory.

Nobody is marking the reading

So let me say plainly what I am not going to do here.

I am not going to hand you a plan. I am not going to suggest a quantity, or a better hour of the morning, or a version with a lion on the cover, and I am certainly not going to imply that the quiet came from too little time in the book. That last one is a cruelty that gets said kindly. It arrives as advice and it lands as a charge, and it is not true.

And I am not going to grade what you felt last time you read. Nobody is standing over the page with a mark scheme. You were loved first, before any of this, and nothing you did or failed to feel started it. Scripture puts it in four words, that we love because He first loved us, and His Spirit poured that love into you at a moment you probably cannot date. A love that began before your enthusiasm did is not going to be audited by it.