The Verse He Reads Past

He has read a chapter a morning for a very long time.

Not out of duty. He would tell you it is the best twenty minutes of his day and he would mean it, and he has done it in three houses and one hospital and once, memorably, on a ferry.

Here is what he noticed about eighteen months ago and has told nobody.

His eyes speed up.

Not on everything. On one particular subject. Whenever the passage turns toward Him coming back, something in the reading changes gear, and he gets through those verses considerably faster than the ones around them, and he arrives at the end of the chapter having technically read all of it.

He has tested it since, deliberately, more than once. Slowed himself down on purpose and read one of them properly.

And his chest does something, every time.

He is not carrying anything. He has been over it in the way men do at four in the morning, and there is nothing outstanding and nothing hidden, and that is not what this is.

He simply cannot sit in those verses, and he has been skimming them for eighteen months, and he is a man who would tell you that he takes Scripture seriously, and he cannot square those two things.

If your eyes speed up somewhere, come and sit on this bench. Nobody is going to explain anything at you.

Blessed is the word Paul chose, and there is nothing in the sentence to brace for

There is a phrase this whole tradition has carried, and what is worth noticing about it is the adjective.

Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ.Titus 2:13

Blessed. Glorious. Those are the two words Paul reaches for, and he is writing to a young man on a difficult island with a great deal to worry about, and he does not reach for anything else.

There is no warning in that sentence. No condition, no sequence, no state of the world, and nothing anybody could use to make a person take it more seriously by making it more frightening.

And the object of the looking is named. It is a Person, appearing. It is not an event with Him in it somewhere.

You are looking toward a Person rather than bracing for an event, and the words Paul picked are blessed and glorious. Titus 2:13 has no warning anywhere in it, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the earnest of the inheritance in Ephesians 1:14, which means the thing your eyes have been speeding past is described in Scripture in the warmest terms it has.

Your chest is not your theology

Now the thing you cannot square, and it squares more easily than you think.

You take Scripture seriously. That is true and eighteen months of skimming does not touch it. A man who reads a chapter every morning in three houses and a hospital is not somebody with a casual relationship to the word.

What is happening is not in your convictions. It is in your body, and bodies are taught by what has happened to them rather than by what they have concluded, which is exactly why every good argument you have had with yourself about this has changed nothing at all. Psalm 103:14 says he knoweth our frame, he remembereth that we are dust, and it is the same Spirit who comforts a body rather than debating with it.

I am not going to send you looking for where it started either. That turns a bench into an excavation and you have enough on.

You are not failing at this, and what your body does before you can think is not a report on your standing. Psalm 103:14 says He knoweth our frame and remembereth that we are dust, and it is the Holy Spirit who holds a man inside a body that reacts faster than he can reason, which means the thing you have been hiding for eighteen months is a thing He already understands.

And here is what this article will not do, because I suspect it is half the reason you have never raised it.

Nothing here describes anything. No sequence, no order, no chart, no reading of the world, and not one sentence built to make you more serious by making you more alarmed. This site does not use fear as a motive, and it will certainly not use it on a man who already has more of it than he asked for.

You have not been given the fear, and that is a statement about supply rather than about your effort. 2 Timothy 1:7 says God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind, and it is the Holy Spirit named in that same line, which means what happens in your chest at those verses did not come from where you have quietly assumed.

God is the one holding you, and He is not waiting at the end of this to find something out about you.