I Only Read The Ones Who Agree With Me

He worked out the number one evening and it bothered him more than he expected.

Nine years. That is roughly how long it has been since he read anything by somebody who might have been right and inconvenient.

He would not have described himself that way. If you had asked him he would have said he reads a great deal, which is true. There is a stack by the chair. He gets through two or three a month and always has.

But they are all from about four writers, and those four agree with each other, and he can tell within a page and a half where any of them is going.

It started for a good reason and that is the part worth being honest about. There was a stretch, around the time his second one left home, where he read a couple of things that shook him and he did not have anybody to talk to about them, and he came out the other side deciding he did not need that.

So the shelf narrowed. Slowly, and reasonably, one sensible decision at a time.

And what he has noticed, and only recently, is that he is tired.

Not doubting. Nothing is cracking. Just a flat, low-grade tiredness around the whole subject that he did not have at forty, and a sense of going over ground he has already crossed, on a route he laid himself.

They checked it daily, and that was the compliment

Now I want to show you a group of people in that account who are described in a way that surprises most folks the first time they see it.

There is a town. Somebody comes preaching, and the people there do something that gets written down and praised, and what they do is not agree.

Hear this and take it as settled rather than as a suggestion: checking is not the opposite of trusting, and the account calls a group noble for exactly the practice you have retired. That is not a country preacher's opinion, it is what stands written in the seventeenth chapter of Acts, and the same Holy Spirit who has been at that kitchen table with you for nine years is not made nervous by a page.

Read what they did and read what it is called.

Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.Acts 17:11

To see if what Paul said was true.

That is a fact-check, run daily, on an apostle. And it is not tolerated, it is commended, and the word used for them is a compliment about their character.

Notice also that they received it with great eagerness. The two things sit in one sentence: open and checking, at the same time, and the writer sees no tension in it at all.

So this is yours right now rather than after you feel braver: your faith does not depend on you avoiding the good arguments, because the written word calls a people noble for testing the preaching daily, and the Spirit of God has never once required a man to protect Him from a book.

And the guard, because there is a version of this that would send you somewhere stupid.

Nothing here says go and read anything at all with no judgment. A man who reads only what attacks him is doing the same thing you are doing in a different direction, and there is such a thing as feeding yourself badly.

What is written simply never treats examination as disloyalty, and the Holy Spirit is the one who leads into truth, which means He is not waiting outside the difficult pages.