I Only Read To Prepare

Four years, and she cannot find one.

She was looking for a single occasion where she had read something with nobody at the end of it. Not for the Tuesday group. Not for the thing she does with the young women. Not for a message she was asked to bring, or a talk, or something she was going to send to somebody who is struggling.

Just her, and a page, and nobody waiting.

She got back four years and stopped, because it had become clear that she was not going to find one and that going further back was going to be worse rather than better.

She reads a great deal. That is what makes it strange. She is probably in that book more hours a week than anybody she knows, and she is not skimming and she works hard at it and people say things about the depth of what she brings.

Every single hour of it has been going somewhere.

And when she noticed, sitting at her own table on a Thursday evening with the light going, what came up was not guilt exactly. It was something more like being winded.

She could not remember what it is like to read something that is only for her. Not the feeling of it. Not what she would even do with a page if nobody was going to hear about it.

Ezra prepared his heart

Sit down at that table a minute, because there is one verse about Ezra that gives the order of things, and the order is the whole teaching.

For Ezra had prepared his heart to seek the law of the Lord, and to do it, and to teach in Israel statutes and judgments.Ezra 7:10

Three things, and they are in a sequence.

To seek the law of the Lord. To do it. And to teach.

Teaching is third. Not because teaching is small, and this verse is not a word against teachers or leaders, and Ezra is one of the great teachers in the Old Testament and the verse is praising him.

It is third because of what has to be underneath it. He sought it, for himself. Then he did it, in his own life, where nobody was watching and nothing was being prepared. And out of that, he taught.

And the first line is the one you have been living without: prepared his heart to seek.

Hear this in your own kitchen. You are not a hypocrite, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture puts the seeking first and the teaching third in the order of one man's life, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has had you in that book more hours a week than anybody you know for four years running.

Now let me name what the audience is doing, because it is not vanity and vanity would be a bad word for a woman who prepares that thoroughly for a Tuesday group of nine.

The audience makes the reading legitimate.

There is always something to be done and somebody who needs something, and an hour spent preparing is an hour you can account for. An hour spent reading for yourself cannot be accounted for to anybody, including you, and a woman who is used to giving an account will find that hour very hard to defend, so it never happens.

Four years is what that looks like. Not a decision. An hour that could never quite justify itself, every week, for two hundred weeks.

Hear this too, and let it land where the light was going. You have not been performing for anybody, and Scripture is what says so. What is written puts seeking at the front of Ezra's own sequence, and the Spirit of God has never once required a woman to have a use for what she is given before she is allowed to receive it.

And here is the thing you have not looked at, because you have been looking at the reading.

You have not been fed by that book in four years. You have been in it constantly and you have been carrying it to other people constantly, and there is a difference between a woman carrying water and a woman drinking it, and both of them are wet at the end of the day. The written word puts the seeking first, and the Spirit of God has been putting water into other people through you for four years.