Still the One Who Checks

He looks things up afterward. All of them. It is completely automatic and he is fifty one.

Somebody says something on a Sunday and by Tuesday he has read the passage in three translations and looked at what two commentators think and found out whether the illustration in the middle actually happened.

He does not do it to catch anybody. He would want that established firmly, because it is what people assume. He is not building a case and he has never once raised a correction with anybody about anything.

He simply cannot receive a thing and leave it unexamined. It has been that way since he was about nineteen.

He asked to be filled four years ago and he means it when he says it changed things, and he would not be able to tell you exactly what changed, which bothers him slightly.

And he still checks.

Here is the thing he has never said, and it took him a while to work out that he was even carrying it.

He has been treating the checking as the leftover. The bit of him that has not yielded. Somewhere in him there is a picture of a person who simply receives, warmly, without the Tuesday, and that person has always looked to him like somebody further along than he is.

The sentence, unsaid: a man who really trusted would not need to go and look.

You may know that Tuesday. The habit you cannot stop, filed under the things about you that have not surrendered.

Luke commends the checking

There is one line in Acts where the historian pauses to say something approving about a particular group, and what he approves of is the exact behavior.

These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.Acts 17:11

Read the two halves that are joined by an and.

They received the word with all readiness of mind. That is the first half and it is unreserved. These are not suspicious people and Luke is not describing reluctance.

And they searched the Scriptures daily, whether those things were so. That is the second half, and it is checking, in plain terms, described as a daily practice, and the man reporting it is holding it up as commendable.

You are doing the thing Luke stops the narrative to commend, and Acts 17:11 joins receiving with all readiness and searching daily with a single and, and it is His Spirit who takes a note about a synagogue in Berea and lands it on a man three translations deep on a Tuesday.

The two halves are not in tension

Consider the conjunction, because it is the whole point and it is easy to slide past.

Luke does not write that they received the word despite searching, or that they searched and eventually managed to receive. He puts the two together as one description of one kind of person, and he treats the combination as the good outcome rather than as a compromise between two competing tendencies.

Which means the picture the man has been carrying, of somebody who simply receives without the Tuesday, is not the New Testament picture of a better hearer. It is not in that verse at all.

And it is worth asking where that picture came from, because it did not come from reading. It came from watching. There are people who look serene when something is said and he has spent thirty years assuming the serenity was trust, when a fair amount of it is simply the absence of the question occurring to them. Those are not the same condition and only one of them is a virtue.

You have been comparing yourself to somebody the text does not describe, because the written word joins readiness and daily searching with an and rather than a but, and the Holy Spirit is what turns a conjunction into four years reread.

And notice who they are checking. Paul. An apostle, in person, with a genuine commission, saying true things. Nobody suggests they should have taken his word for it because of who he was, and Luke, who is Paul's own traveling companion and admirer, writes the checking down approvingly.

You have never been checking somebody you should have taken on trust, and Acts 17 has people examine an apostle and get commended for it in the same breath, and the same Spirit who inspired both the preaching and the record is the one who fills.

The Tuesday is not the leftover

Now the file he did not know he was keeping, which deserves a direct answer.

Nothing about the checking indicates an unsurrendered corner. There is no verse anywhere describing the yielded life as one in which a person stops examining, and there is no character in the book who is praised for accepting things without reference to Scripture.

What there is, in that Berean sentence, is a description of somebody doing exactly what he does on Tuesdays, put down in writing by a historian who was there, with the word noble attached to it.

And the searching in that verse is daily. Not once, when something sounded doubtful. Every day, as an ordinary practice, by people who had already received the thing gladly, which is a description of a settled habit rather than of an unresolved suspicion.

You were never carrying a leftover, because Acts 17:11 makes daily searching part of what is being commended rather than what is being tolerated, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that a relief for a man who has quietly held it against himself for four years.