Is Not My Word Like a Fire

The preparation takes about twelve minutes and the reading takes about eight, and she has never once thought that ratio was strange.

She learned it at twenty-three and she learned it from somebody she admired. Do not just crash into it, the woman said. Quiet yourself first. Put yourself in a place to receive.

So she does. She sits. She does the breathing. She plays something quiet, and she has three particular tracks for this and gets irritable if she cannot find them. She confesses whatever is on her, deliberately, so as not to be reading with anything in the way. She tries to arrive at a certain settledness that she would find hard to describe but knows immediately when it is not there.

And then, most days, it is not there. So she works at it a bit longer. And by the time she opens the book she is tired, and the eight minutes are perfunctory, and she has, over about six years, built a threshold in front of her own Bible that she now cannot get over most mornings.

She is thirty-four. She has begun, lately, to skip the whole thing on the days when she can tell in advance she will not be able to get settled, which is a sentence she has never allowed herself to look at directly.

Whose fire it is

God asks a rhetorical question in Jeremiah about His own word, and the answer to it settles who is responsible for the heat.

Is not my word like as a fire? saith the LORD; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?Jeremiah 23:29

My word is like a fire.

The fire is the word. Not the atmosphere around it, and not the state of the person opening it. The word is the burning thing, and the hammer is the word, and God asks it as a question because He expects the answer to be obvious.

Now put your twelve minutes next to that. What have you been doing in them? You have been trying to produce warmth, in yourself, before approaching the thing that Scripture says is the fire.

You have been lighting kindling in front of a furnace. That is not me being clever at your expense; Jeremiah 23:29 puts the fire in the word rather than in the reader, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and lays it over a woman with three particular tracks and a threshold she cannot get over.

What the woman at twenty-three actually meant

Now let me be careful about her, because I think she said something reasonable and you built something enormous on it.

Quiet yourself, put the phone down, do not crash in from the school run: that is ordinary courtesy toward a serious thing and it is worth doing. It takes about forty seconds.

What she did not mean, and would be horrified by, is a required interior state that has to be achieved before God will speak. That is a doctrine, and it is a serious one, and nobody ever taught it to you deliberately. It grew.

And look at what it has produced. It has put a gate in front of the book, and you are the gatekeeper, and you are failing to open your own gate on most mornings, and lately you have begun to skip the days when you can see in advance you will not manage it. That is a person being kept from Scripture by her own reverence for it.

You have been standing at a gate you built, holding a key nobody asked you to hold. The written word puts the fire and the hammer in God's own mouth as descriptions of what His word is, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for a settledness that a tired thirty-four-year-old can produce.

And I want to say plainly, because you will suspect it: the failure to get settled is not resistance in you, and it is not sin, and it is not a sign of anything. Some mornings a person cannot get calm. That is a body and a life and a week, and no part of it disqualifies anybody from anything.

You are welcome at that book unsettled, and there has never been a condition of arrival. Scripture calls the word a fire without naming one requirement in the person holding it, and the Holy Spirit has been the one carrying it through six years of preparations that wore a woman out before she started.