He Only Knows the Verses That Were Used on Him

He could list them. There are about six and he knows exactly where each one came from.

Two came from an argument in a kitchen when he was fifteen. One came from a man at a funeral who said it in a way that was meant to close something down. Two came off a wall in a house he lived in for eight months. The last one he could not source and suspects is not in there at all.

Every one of them arrived pointed at him. Not one of them arrived as information.

So when somebody says the word Bible, that is what is in the room. Six sentences, all of them used, all of them still carrying the tone of the person who said them.

And here is what that has done, and it is worth being plain about it. He has never had a neutral experience of that book in his life. He has no idea what is in it. He has an idea of what it is for, and what he thinks it is for is winning.

He chose His own text and read it out loud

There is a scene where Jesus goes to His hometown, stands up in the meeting, and is handed a scroll.

He gets to pick. And what He picks tells you what He was for.

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised. (Luke 4:18, King James Version)

Read the list. Poor. Brokenhearted. Captives. Blind. Bruised.

Every single item is somebody on the receiving end of something.

Out of the whole scroll of Isaiah, that is the passage He chooses to read out loud in the room where He grew up, as the opening statement of everything that follows.

You are on the list He read out when He picked His own text. Luke 4 has Him choosing the passage and reading it out loud in public, and it is the Spirit of the Lord, named in the first line of it, who is the one He says is upon Him.

And He stopped reading in the middle of a sentence

Here is the detail that almost nobody notices, and it is one of the most deliberate things in the Gospels.

The passage He is reading, Isaiah 61, continues. The next phrase is about the day of vengeance of our God.

And he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and sat down. (Luke 4:20)

He stops before that phrase. Mid sentence, effectively. Then He closes it and sits down.

He chose where to stop. In a room full of people who knew the passage by heart and would have noticed the gap.

Whatever He was announcing that day, He deliberately left the other half out of it.

You are inside the half He chose to read. Luke 4 has Him closing the book at a chosen point, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old editorial decision feel like it was made about somebody in particular.

Look at what He said most often

If somebody's whole Bible is six weapons, the useful exercise is to look at what the man in the middle of the book actually said when He opened His mouth.

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. (Matthew 11:28-29)

Come. Learn. Rest. Meek and lowly.

That is Him describing His own manner, unprompted, in His own words.

He said hard things too, and He said them mostly to people who were using religion on other people. That is a pattern worth noticing when six verses arrived pointed.

You have never once been on the receiving end of what He was actually like. Matthew 11 has Him describing His own manner in His own words, and it is His Spirit who makes a self-description reach a man who only knows the tone of somebody's kitchen.

He says outright what He came for

There is a sentence in John where He states the purpose plainly, and He puts a contrast in front of it.

The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly. (John 10:10)

More abundantly.

He is contrasting Himself with something that takes. And the word for what He brings is not survival, it is abundance.

A man whose whole Bible is six weapons has been handed a version of this that is entirely about restriction. That version is not the one in the sentence.

You are looking at somebody who stated His purpose in the same breath as the contrast. John 10 puts the thief and the abundance side by side, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old contrast do something to six sentences from a kitchen.

And the psalm says try it yourself

There is a line in the Psalms that is an instruction about method.

O taste and see that the LORD is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him. (Psalm 34:8)

Taste and see.

Not be told and accept. Not take somebody's word for it. Two verbs, both of them first hand.

Whoever wrote that assumed the reader would go and find out rather than rely on a report, and the report is what six verses in a kitchen amounts to.

You are told to find out first hand rather than take the report. Psalm 34 uses two verbs of direct experience, and it is His Spirit who makes an old instruction feel like something a man can actually do this week.