I Read Everything About It

Four shelves. He counted them once, in a fit of something, and stopped counting the individual volumes at a hundred and nine.

The Greek stuff is on the top shelf where the light is bad, which is a small joke he made to himself years ago and has never explained to anybody. Then the historical shelf. Then the shelf that is really eleven separate arguments having a very long disagreement with each other in hardback. Then the bottom shelf, which is the one with the photocopied pamphlets and the two spiral-bound things from a conference in a hotel outside Leeds in the nineties.

He can tell you what each side says. Not a caricature of it. The actual case, in its strongest form, the way its best defender would put it, which is the only honest way to hold an argument you disagree with and is a discipline he learned early and is genuinely proud of.

He has been asked about it in three different homes and given a fair answer every time.

And his body has never been anywhere near it.

That is the sentence he wrote in the back of a notebook about eighteen months ago, at eleven at night, and then closed the notebook and put it in the drawer and has not opened it since. My body has never been anywhere near it.

Because that is the thing about four shelves. There is always another one. There is always a book he has not read, and there is always a serious person who takes a view he has not fully worked through, and while there is one of those the matter is under consideration, and a matter under consideration is not a matter avoided. It is scholarship. It is care. It is, in fact, exactly what a thoughtful man ought to be doing.

He is fifty-one. He has been under consideration since he was twenty-six.

Rain on the study window last Thursday, two lamps on, and a friend brought a tray of tea in and had to move a stack of books to put it down, and said, entirely without malice, "Are you still on this?" And they both laughed, and it was funny, and he thought about it at four in the morning.

What the reading was for

I am not going to tell you that you have read too much.

I want to be clear about that immediately, because you have heard some version of it before, usually from somebody who has read considerably less, and it is not true and it is not what is going on here. Those four shelves are not the problem. The Greek on the top shelf is not the problem. A man who can state the opposing case in its strongest form is doing something that most people who have opinions never bother to do, and God is not rolling His eyes at your bibliography.

The reading was good. What I want to look at is what it has been doing for you lately, which is a different question and a fairer one.

Here is the fact I want to put underneath you first, because everything else stands on it.

And ye are complete in him, which is the head of all principality and power.Colossians 2:10

Sit on the word complete. Not progressing toward complete. Not complete pending the resolution of an outstanding question. You are complete in Him, at fifty-one, with the notebook still in the drawer, and that is not a thing I am generously extending to you, it is the written word, and the Holy Spirit is the reason a sentence that short is landing with weight rather than being catalogued.

And look at where Paul puts that verse. It sits in the middle of a chapter warning about being taken captive through philosophy and empty deceit, and the striking thing is that Paul does not answer the philosophy with a better philosophy. He answers it with a person, and with a completeness that is already the reader's, and that is a move worth noticing from a man who could out-argue anybody in the room.

Now let me say the thing, as plainly as I can, and you can decide whether it lands.

There is a use of study that is inquiry, and there is a use of study that is postponement, and the two are indistinguishable from the outside. They produce the same shelves. They produce the same fair answers in three different homes. The only place they can be told apart is in the small hours, in a notebook, in one sentence a man writes and then puts in a drawer.

You have known for eighteen months. And I am not saying that to convict you, because there is nothing here to convict you of. The word says you are complete in Him and the Spirit is the one who has been quietly pressing on this at four in the morning, and He does that because He is a Comforter and not a prosecutor.

I want to say something about the top shelf, where the light is bad.

That joke you have never explained to anybody is one of the more honest things in that room. Some things you have put where you cannot easily read them. And I think part of you knows that the hundred and nine volumes are arranged, however unconsciously, so that there is always one more.

You are not required to finish the shelf. There is no version of that verse where completeness arrives when the reading does. Scripture puts your completeness in Him, entirely, and the Spirit inside you is the seal on that, and it was as true when you had one shelf as it is with four.

And here is the last one, and it is the one I would want you to take away if you took nothing else.

You have been complete since you were twenty-six. All twenty-five years of consideration have been carried out by a man who was already complete in Christ the entire time he was considering. The word settles it. The Spirit confirms it. And no book on any of those four shelves, on any side of any argument, was ever capable of adding to it or taking a single thing away.