Proclaimer Blog
Simply reading is not simple
Simply reading what Scripture says is really difficult. Here’s what I mean:
I was recently looking with a group at just two verses – Titus 2.1-2: “But as for you, teach what accords with sound doctrine. Older men are to be sober-minded, dignified, self-controlled, sound in faith, in love, and in steadfastness.”
Just two verses. No difficult words. No complex logic. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, at least half of the people in the group took from it as their first point: “Elders must teach sound doctrine.” How true! But look again: how different from what Paul actually wrote to Titus here.
Here he doesn’t tell Titus to teach sound doctrine. He tells him to teach what ‘accords with’ sound doctrine.
What is that, we might ask, having just read v.1? Verses 2ff. tell us: it’s all these instructions that Titus is to teach to different groups in the churches. When we notice this, then a rather different central point to the sermon emerges: “Elders must teach the lifestyle that fits with sound doctrine.”
I certainly don’t mock any of the people in the group who fell into the bear-trap of not actually reading carefully the few simple words in Titus 2.1-2 that were in front of them. We all simply fail to simply read all the time. (Anyone who’s ever tried to proof-read a document that they’ve written and have missed obvious bloopers despite countless reading will know how hard it is. And there’s plenty of study been done that shows that, when we read, our eyes are both constantly scanning ahead and also taking in whole words or short phrases at a single glance.)
This means that the preacher needs to find ways of forcing himself to slow down his reading. There’s no one right way of doing this. For myself, I try always to write out by hand any passage I’m speaking on, word for word. If I’ve got two or three long chapters of OT narrative as a single unit, I might just allow myself to summarise paragraph by paragraph.
The main reason I do this is simply that it forcibly slows the speed of my reading down to the speed at which I can write.
(And I’m old enough to think that having pen in hand focuses my concentration. I’d like to find biblical warrant for this prejudice held by many like me whose childhood computer was a Sinclair Spectrum and who therefore are still slightly agog at contemporary technology, but I can’t.)
The more familiar a Bible passage is, the more necessary I find this process. That’s because the more familiar I am with it, the more I think I know in advance what it says. And in that case when I think I’m reading it I’m really not. I’m just looking at the text on the page while the tape of what I think it says is playing in my mind.
Every preacher needs to find their own way of doing this. But we need to give God the respect of slowing down our reading of his word.