He Did Not Read The Books They Read

They use words in there that he would have to look up afterwards, and once or twice he has.

They have read the same three books, or four, and they refer to them the way you refer to a place everybody has been. Somebody says a name and everybody in the room nods, and he nods too, about a beat late, and has done for years.

He has forty years of doing this with his hands.

That is not nothing and he knows it is not nothing. He could tell you things about how it actually goes that are not in any of those books, because they are the sort of things that only turn up if you have been out in it in February for four decades.

He worked out about nine years ago that he was not going to say any of it.

And he has not. Not once, in nine years, in that room.

Nobody has ever noticed that he stopped. That is worth saying and it is not a complaint. There was no moment. He simply moved, quietly, from a man who occasionally said something to a man who does not, and the room absorbed it the way a room absorbs anything gradual.

Here is the actual reason, and it is smaller and more embarrassing than anybody would guess.

It is not that they would laugh. They would not laugh. They are decent and one of them in particular would go out of his way to make something of whatever he said.

It is that he would say a plain thing, in a room of finished sentences, and he would hear how it sounded coming out of his own mouth, and then he would have to sit there for another forty minutes with that.

If you have ruled yourself out of a room, come and lean on this gate. There is tea in that flask and nobody out here has read anything either.

What the council actually wrote down

There is a scene where two working men stand in front of the most educated religious body of their day, and the record of what that body noticed is one of the most useful sentences in Acts.

Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were unlearned and ignorant men, they marvelled; and they took knowledge of them, that they had been with Jesus.Acts 4:13

Read it slowly, because there are three things in it and people usually only take the last.

They saw boldness. They perceived the men were unlearned. Both of those, at once, about the same two men, and neither cancels the other.

And then the third thing. They took knowledge of them, that they had been with Jesus.

That is what the room concluded. Not that the men were secretly educated. Not that they had prepared well. The council looked at two fishermen speaking plainly and identified the only qualification that was actually present, and it was time spent with Christ.

You are standing on the qualification a hostile council could identify from across a room. Acts 4:13 puts unlearned and ignorant men and boldness in the same sentence and names having been with Jesus as what the observers concluded, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept all three of those in one verse, which means forty years of being out in it in February has never once been the wrong kind of preparation.

What the disqualification actually was

Now the thing you decided nine years ago, because it deserves a proper look and it has never had one.

The rule you made was: people who have not read what the others have read do not speak.

Nobody proposed that rule. It was not in force before you adopted it, and it is not in force now for anybody else in that room, and if you stated it out loud those men would be appalled.

It was made by one man, on his own, on the way home, and it has been enforced with total consistency for nine years by the only person subject to it.

You have been keeping a rule you wrote yourself and have applied to nobody else. Romans 12:3 says to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith, and it corrects a person thinking too highly of himself and equally a person thinking of himself as no measure at all, and it is the same Spirit who distributes to every man severally as He chooses, which means what you were dealt is a measure and not an absence.

What forty years of hands actually is

Here is a thing worth turning round, because it changes the shape of that room.

A book is somebody's forty years, written down.

That is all a book is. Somebody did a thing, or watched a thing, or thought about a thing for a long time, and then put it into sentences so other people could have it without doing the forty years.

You have the forty years. You have simply not written them down, and nobody has asked you to.

You are carrying the raw material that books are made out of, and having it unwritten does not make it less true. Proverbs 4:7 says wisdom is the principal thing, therefore get wisdom, and with all thy getting get understanding, and it never once specifies the route by which it is got, and it is the same Spirit who is called the Spirit of wisdom and understanding in Isaiah, which means what is in your hands after forty Februaries is the thing those books are trying to describe.