Half The Verse

He can teach that verse. He has taught it, more than once, and taught it well.

They continued stedfastly in the apostles' doctrine, and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers.

He has always liked it because it is a complete description in one line, and he has said that out loud from the front, and he was right.

What he did in the spring, on his own, at the desk, is go through it as an inventory.

Doctrine. Yes. Enormously. He reads properly, in the original where he can, and he has notebooks going back nineteen years, and if there is a man in that town who is more careful with a text he has not met him.

Fellowship. He worked out that he had not sat down with another believer, outside a Sunday, in something like fourteen months. He is at the building every week and he speaks to a great many people. He has not sat down with one.

Breaking of bread. In the plain sense of that phrase, which includes an ordinary meal in an ordinary house, he could not date the last one.

Prayers. Plural, which in that verse means with other people. He prays constantly on his own, in the car, at the desk, at three in the morning. He has not prayed out loud with another human being since a funeral two years ago.

One out of four, and the one he has, he has magnificently.

He sat there with the inventory in front of him and thought: I have built nineteen years on the first word in a list of four, and I have been calling it the whole verse the entire time.

And, and, and

Sit down at that table a minute, because you know this verse better than most people ever will, and I want to point at the grammar rather than the content.

And they continued stedfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers.Acts 2:42

Four items, joined by three ands.

Not a list of options. Not four temperaments, so that a studious man does the first one and a warm man does the second. It is one sentence describing one group of people who were doing all four, continually, and the word stedfastly governs the whole line rather than the first item in it.

You know all this. You could have written it, and better.

So let me put the harder thing beside it, since you are the sort of man who would rather have it straight, and since the Holy Spirit has been putting it in front of you since the spring anyway.

The first item is the only one you can do alone.

Hear this at your own desk. You are not a fraud, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture puts stedfastly at the front of all four rather than the first, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept you careful with a text for nineteen years and put good things into other people through it.

Now let me name what happened, because it is not hypocrisy and hypocrisy would be a stupid word for a man who did that inventory on his own and told nobody.

Doctrine is the only one that survives without an appointment.

You can read at six in the morning without asking anybody, and it never gets canceled, and it does not depend on somebody being free on Thursday. The other three all require a second person, and a second person means arranging, and arranging is the exact thing that quietly stops during a hard year and never restarts, because nothing marks its absence.

Nineteen years of the one that needs nobody, and fourteen months of the ones that do.

Hear this too, and let it land where the inventory is. You have not wasted nineteen years, and Scripture is what says so. What is written joins all four with an and and never ranks them, and the Spirit of God has been in every hour of that careful reading and has not withheld one thing from you in it.

And the fourth one, prayers, which I suspect is the one you flinched at.

You are a man who prays. You would be astonished to be called prayerless and it would not be true. But that word is plural in that verse and it means with other people, out loud, where somebody hears you, and you have not done it in two years, and you know exactly why: you would hear yourself. The written word puts prayers in the plural in that line, and the Spirit of God has been with you at three in the morning through every one of those two years.