The Book I Cannot Get Through

She finds the right page. She has always been able to find the right page.

She learned the trick a long time ago: watch the woman on your left, count the pages she turns, get there about a second after her, and then look down and keep your finger moving.

Forty-one years in that building and nobody has ever known.

She can read. I want to be careful, because people hear this wrong. She is not unable to read. She can read a form and a letter and the label on a tin, slowly, and she gets there.

But the words move about, and they always have, and after about four minutes of it her eyes are tired and the sense has gone, and reading a chapter is like carrying water in her hands. Some of it arrives. Most of it does not.

She has never got through the whole Bible. She has tried nine times that she can count. She has three different Bibles in the house, one of them with very large print, bought hopefully, used for a fortnight.

And here is what it has cost her, which is not what you would guess.

It has not cost her faith. She has more of that than most of the people in the rows around her, and everybody knows it, and that is why they come to her kitchen.

What it has cost her is a conviction, held quietly since she was about nine, that whatever God gives to people who really know Him, He gives through a page, and that the door He gives it through is a door she cannot get through.

Now put her down a minute.

What do you do with your eyes when everybody else turns to the passage?

Paul said the choosing was deliberate

There is a passage in the first letter to Corinth that people quote as comfort, and it is not comfort. It is much stronger than comfort. It is a statement about God's method.

But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things, and the things that are not, to nullify the things that are.1 Corinthians 1:27 and 28

Chose. Four times in two verses. Not permitted. Not made allowance for. Chose, which is a word about intention.

Paul is not saying God tolerates the unimpressive. He is saying God went and picked them, on purpose, as the deliberate strategy, so that when the thing worked nobody would be able to explain it by the equipment.

Now hear that against forty-one years of counting pages.

You are not around the edge of something that happens through a book you cannot manage. Scripture says God chose the lowly and the despised and the things that are not, and the Spirit never once handed anything out on the strength of a reading age.

And I want to say the next part slowly, because it is the part that has actually been wrong all this time.

The word of God is not a page. It is a word.

That is not a clever line, it is the plain fact of the thing. It was spoken for hundreds of years before it was written, and read aloud for hundreds after, and for most of the history of the Church the great majority of the people who loved it best could not read a syllable of it. They knew it because they heard it. It went in through the ear and it stayed.

You have been treating a delivery method as the door. And it was never the door. It was one of several.

You know more Scripture than you think, and it is in you the old way, by hearing, which is the way most of the saints of God have had it. The word says faith comes by hearing. Not by reading. That was written by a man in a world where almost nobody could read, and it was written that way on purpose.

The fire this house is named for fell in 1906 in a stable in Los Angeles, and the room was full of people who had been kept out of schoolrooms all their lives, and the man at the front had been made to sit in a hallway because he was not permitted in the class.

God has never run a room by the reading list.

And you have more of it in you than you have ever given yourself credit for. 1 Corinthians 1 uses the word chose four times in two verses, which is a word about intention and never about allowance, and the Spirit He poured out has never handed anything out on the strength of a reading age.