The Bible Under the Feed-Store Receipt

For the man who taught the early study for years and can't open the book for himself.

You know exactly where it is, which is under a feed store receipt and a seed catalogue on the corner of the kitchen table, and you know how long it's been under there.

Six years you taught that study. Quarter past six on a Thursday, in the back room, eleven or twelve men depending on the season. You made the coffee yourself because nobody else could be trusted with it.

You'd read the passage on the Tuesday and again on the Wednesday night. Then you'd write four points on an index card, and you never once used more than two of them.

The study ended when the building changed hands. Nobody's fault. Everybody said they'd keep meeting and everybody meant it, and it lasted about seven weeks.

Since then you have opened that book maybe three times, and every time you've felt something you couldn't name. Reading it without eleven men waiting felt like practicing for a game that isn't scheduled.

The lamp in that psalm is for one man's own feet, and no study is coming on Thursday. Scripture's psalm was written down in the first person singular, and the Spirit lights it for a man with nothing to prepare.

Preparing Is Not the Same as Reading

Six years is long enough for one activity to grow over the top of another until you can't see the first one any more.

You read in order to prepare. That's honorable work, you did it well, and eleven men were fed by it. But every reading had a job attached, the job was Thursday, and the reading and the job grew together until they were one object in your mind.

Now the job's gone, so the reading has no purpose, and picking up the book feels like doing half of something. Your hands know what comes next and there's nothing for them to do with it.

That isn't backsliding. It's a craftsman standing in a workshop with no order on the bench, which is a real and disorienting condition and has nothing whatever to do with whether he still loves the trade.

Ask any tradesman who retired well and he'll tell you the first year was the hard one. Not the loss of the money and not the loss of the work. The loss of somebody waiting on the result.

You aren't a man who lost his faith, but a man who lost the job attached to it. The written Word's psalm as written gives the lamp to the one walking rather than to the one teaching, and the Spirit lights it for a man at a kitchen table.

A Lamp for One Set of Feet

Here's the verse, and the pronouns in it matter more than people usually notice.

Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.Psalm 119:105 (KJV)

My feet. My path. Singular, first person, one man walking in the dark with a lamp held at ankle height. There's no congregation anywhere in the sentence and nobody being taught.

The whole psalm runs like that. It's one person talking to God about God's word, at length, mostly at night, with nobody else in the room and no audience implied.

Those words were first written by somebody in serious trouble with no audience at all, and they arrive at a farmhouse table without narrowing. The lamp was always for a man's own feet first.

You are given a lamp for your own feet, with nobody else required to be present. Scripture's psalm as written puts the light on one person's path, and the Spirit gives it to a man on a Thursday nobody is coming to.

The Index Cards in the Drawer

Ask about something that's almost certainly in that house somewhere.

You kept the cards. Six years of them, probably in a box or a drawer, held with a rubber band that's gone brittle. You have never thrown them out and you've never looked at them either.

Those cards aren't evidence of a job that ended. Every one of them is a morning you sat with a passage until it gave you something, which is a thing a man can only do by actually reading.

You've been telling yourself you only ever read for Thursday. The cards say otherwise. Four points written and two used means six years of reading past what you needed, and a man who reads past what he needs is reading for himself whether he'd admit it or not.

You were reading for yourself the whole time, and the cards are the proof of it. The written Word's psalm as written puts the light on the reader's own path first, and the Spirit has been feeding you longer than you've given Him credit for.

I Am Not Getting You Back Behind a Table

Be straight about what this won't do, because you'd hear it coming and shut the door.

I'm not telling you to start a study. Not a new group, not two men and a coffee pot, not a call on a Thursday morning. If something like that happens one day and it's good, I'll be glad, and nothing here depends on it.

Nor am I telling you to read daily, or to read at all this week. There's no minimum in this and there isn't going to be one.

What I want off that table is the sense that reading without a Thursday is pointless. Not the receipt. Not the catalogue.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

Written by Elias This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.