I Can Exegete It in Four Minutes

Give me any verse, you would say, if you were the sort of person who said things like that, and in four minutes I will tell you where it sits, who it was written to, what the word behind that word is doing, and which of the two obvious readings is wrong and why.

That is true. It is a real skill and it took years, and people have been genuinely helped by it.

And you have not been fed by a verse in about a year.

You noticed it properly in the spring. Somebody read something aloud, badly, at a gathering, and everybody around you was visibly affected, and you sat there having already located the passage, already anticipated the point, already noticed the misquotation in the second clause.

You were not being superior about it. You could not stop. It happens before you decide, the way a musician cannot hear a wrong note as anything but a wrong note.

By the time the verse finished you had done four minutes of work on it and it had not touched you at all.

That is the shape of the year. Not dryness in the usual sense; you read constantly. It is that every sentence gets opened before it can arrive, and a thing that has been opened does not arrive.

You are not lacking Scripture. You are lacking the ability to be on the receiving end of it, and that is a different problem with a different remedy.

What this page will not do

I am not going to tell you the study was a mistake. It was not, and the strain of Christianity that treats learning as the enemy of intimacy produces people who feel a great deal and can say very little about what.

I am not going to tell you to stop. Your work feeds other people and you would be worse at it, and so would they, if you dismantled it out of guilt about a dry year.

And I am not going to give you a selection, because that would put you straight back into the posture that is causing this: you would compare them, weigh them, and choose, and the choosing is exactly the problem.

You get one. It was handed to you rather than offered.

You are not disqualified from being fed by knowing too much. Scripture says thou hast searched me, and known me, Psalm 139:1, and being known runs in the other direction from knowing, and the Holy Spirit is present in a study with a man who has read everything and received nothing.

Here it is

Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of mine heart.Jeremiah 15:16

That is yours. Do not look up the Hebrew.

I mean that as the instruction rather than as a joke. You know what the verb is doing. Leave it.

Look at the picture instead, because it is deliberately physical. I did eat them. Not studied them, not weighed them, not compared them against the surrounding text. Ate.

Eating is the one relationship with a thing that cannot be done at a distance. You cannot eat something and remain outside it. It goes in, it becomes you, and nothing about the process is analytical.

And notice who is speaking. Jeremiah was not an untrained man. He knew the text; he quotes it constantly, he argues with God in its own vocabulary. This is not a simple person's testimony about simple reading. It is a scholar describing the other thing that has to happen as well.

You are not required to choose between knowing and being fed. Scripture says thy words were found, and I did eat them, Jeremiah 15:16, and it is a trained man describing eating rather than examining, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a sentence nourishing to somebody who could take it apart in four minutes.

Why it happens before you decide

This is worth understanding, because you have been trying to stop it by will and it has not worked. This rests on Scripture in Jeremiah 15:16, and on the Holy Spirit who makes what is written a living thing.

Expertise is not a thing you do. It is a thing you have become. A trained ear does not choose to hear the wrong note; the hearing is automatic, it happens before conscious attention, and no amount of resolve interrupts it. Scripture already said it in Jeremiah 15:16, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the work, not the sentence.

So telling yourself to read devotionally is like telling yourself not to understand a sentence in your own language. The comprehension arrives before the instruction does.

Which means the remedy is not willpower. It is conditions.

You cannot stop analyzing while the analytical apparatus is in the room. That is why it never happens at your desk: the books are there, the software is there, the reflex has everything it needs within reach and it fires.

Change the room and the reflex has nothing to reach for. That is the whole practical content of this page.

You are not going to be able to think your way out of thinking. Scripture says except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven, Matthew 18:3, and a child does not receive by suspending judgement but by not yet having built the apparatus, and the Holy Spirit is not asking you to unlearn anything, only to be somewhere it is not to hand.

What eating looks like for somebody like you

It looks strange and slightly uncomfortable, and it takes about four minutes, which is the same four minutes you would have spent on the other thing.

Take one verse. This one. Sit somewhere that is not your desk, with nothing else open, and no books within reach.

Read it out loud. Slowly. Then read it out loud again.

You will immediately notice yourself starting to work, and you will find yourself thinking about the verb, and about where it sits in the chapter, which is a bleak chapter and the contrast is significant. That will happen. Do not fight it and do not scold yourself.

Just go back to reading it out loud. That is the whole discipline: not suppression, only return.

Do that daily for two weeks and something shifts. Not because you tried harder, but because you gave a sentence a room where it could arrive without being met at the door and taken apart.

You are not too far gone for this. Scripture says taste and see that the Lord is good, Psalm 34:8, and taste is a sensory verb chosen deliberately over an analytical one, and the Holy Spirit works in the faculty that reading around a text has not been exercising.