Reading All the Words

On our digital screens, we are reading faster, skimming over the words. Also, when we read something familiar, we tend to read past some of the details. My old buddy John Owen drew my attention to some words in the Bible that are vitally important - words that I sometimes tend to read past.

Paul wrote to his young associate, Timothy, and told him to “Follow the patter of sound words” and to “guard the good deposit.” Perhaps we today would paraphrase, “stick to the stuff” or “keep on keeping on.” But that’s not what Paul wrote, not if you read all the words.

He said that Timothy was to “follow the pattern of sound words that you have heard from me in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.” He is reminding us that faith and love are found first in Jesus, not ourselves, and that He is the source of fountain of such faith and love. Without that Resource in our lives, we won’t be able to “follow the pattern of sound words,” but will find that our ideals and intentions quickly crash against the rocky shore of our short attention spans and weak wills.

The twin admonitions of vv. 13,14 are written in an ABBA pattern. The often overlooked words in the first line appear last, while in the second line appear first. Preceding “guard the good deposit” are these in-dispensable words “By the Holy Spirit who dwells within us.” Paul is saying that, apart from this ministry of the Holy Spirit, we will trade away the good deposit for whatever the current cultural thought of the day prefers. Leaving the front door of the store unlocked is not guarding, and it is the Holy Spirit who guards.

If we would read all the words, we would find that the Bible is God-soaked, and that the instructions and strategies for living the Christian life are also God-soaked. But in our over- or under-reading of the Bible, we begin to forget this truth, and begin to interpret the instructions as something that we can handle on our own.

Several years ago a neighbor boy came to a children’s program at our church. He went home and told his parents he did not think that he would return because “they talk too much about God there.” I was amazed that anyone would think that it should or could be different. But, then to find out, I discover that I myself am prone to something similar when I read my Bible but fail to read all the words. In so doing, I re-create the Bible into a mere human manifesto, and I distort the Christian life from that which depends on God’s grace to some kind of “fit-body boot camp” for the soul, powered solely by my own sweat.