Leaving Your Signature

Sinclair Ferguson, one of the truly great and godly theologians and pastors alive today, tells a story of William Still, who was a mentor to him, beginning in his college days at Aberdeen in Scotland. Young Ferguson had been under the older pastor’s discipleship for some time when, one day, suffering from some ailment or other, he received from the older man a bottle of medicine. ‘This is the first thing you ever gave me,’ said Ferguson playfully. ‘Put your signature on it.’ To which Mr. Still replied, unforgettably, ‘That’s not where I want to put my signature. I want to put it here’ he said, pointing at his young disciple’s heart.

What a picture! And what an aim – to write your signature on someone else’s heart; to leave an indelible stamp upon their life, for good, as they learn to follow Christ by following you, Christ’s follower (1 Corinthians 11:1)! That is a goal that every Christian ought to have – with our children, first of all; with younger believers, or believers who are younger in the faith; with neighbors and co-workers whom we hope will someday become believers. If our signatures have been shaped by our relationship with Christ, then what a gift if we can leave such signatures on the hearts of those near to us, whom we also hope to see shaped into Christ’s image!

Thank about whom that might be in your own life. Who is the person (or who are the persons) in your life, next to whom you may have been strategically placed by the hand of God, so as to leave a lasting mark for good? And are you intentional about writing your signature (and Christ’s through yours) on their hearts? And how do you go about doing that? How might your personality and theirs; your schedule and theirs; your life stage and theirs come together so that a real relationship of discipleship can take place?

The Bible must surely be at the center of such a relationship. And yet it must be a real relationship, too (not a Bible study only) – the kind in which the truths of the Bible can be fleshed out in the comings and goings of every day life. So think that out. Who has God given you, and how might you develop the kind of gospel friendship in which a more seasoned saint is regularly adding salt to one who is up and coming? Or if you are the one in need of seasoning, whom might you ask for their signature? Think it out this fall. And perhaps begin brainstorming ideas of how 2017 might be a year in which you begin, like Mr. Still, to write your signature (or ask someone to write theirs) some place where it will still be bearing fruit when you (or they) have long since left this life.

A Plea for the Place of Words

Expounding insights gleaned, largely, from Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death

With both feet, we as a society have crossed the cultural border from an epoch of words and into an era of pictures (both still and moving). I get it. For I, too, am a child of my culture in many ways. There are many evenings when, for instance, rather than read to my children, I’d much rather just sit down in front of a screen and watch something together. It’s just easier that way. Listening requires more mental effort than watching; reading necessitates even more effort; and reading aloud still more. Plus, I understand that watching something on a screen (which almost always involves listening, too) engages an additional sense in ways that are often truly engaging, and sometimes helpful.

Further, I realize that even still imagery captures the eye much more rapidly than words – which is why books have artwork on their covers, and why we are now attaching such to our online sermons, and why pictures on Facebook seem to always generate a great many more ‘likes’ than plain text. Sight seems to be the dominant sense of modern mankind. And there are surely ways in which we should (within reason) make use of that tendency.

I understand all these things, and do not decry pictures and film, as such. And yet I do believe that, in our cultural evolution from words to images, we are in the process of losing some things quite precious. Most modern Americans, I dare say, read very little. And what they do read is often quite brief (and sometimes inane). And, if they do not attend church, it may have been years since many of our neighbors ever sat and concentrated on someone speaking for 30-60 minutes solid (if they’ve ever done so). And these are great losses, it seems to me.

For one thing, the hard work of reading or listening (as opposed to watching) is good for the mind. Forcing yourself to concentrate on a 45 minute speech, or on several consecutive chapters of a book, is good for us. Watching a movie or TV show, on the other hand, is often inactive. Ideas are merely thrown at us, rather than us having to mine them out of carefully crafted words. And thus, watching often doesn’t have the capacity for sharpening our minds the way focusing on words does. And it’s a dangerous thing, it seems to me, that we are raising a generation of children who do not know how to concentrate. Much of this problem, I am convinced, is because they are being raised with constantly moving pictures rather than with words that make them think.

Further, the rapid replacement of words with pictures means that we, of necessity, cannot handle many topics with an appropriate level of depth and/or sophistication. Pictures (moving and still) work well with the telling of stories, and sometimes the conveying of feelings. But they don’t work so well with outlining theological doctrines, and worldview beliefs, and political positions, and so on. For these we need words … often in large quantities. And, in a culture that is no longer apt to consume words in large quantities, is it any surprise that most Americans get their theology, their worldview, and their politics from brief soundbites, rather than with significant depth of research, thought, and understanding?

Finally, the waning epoch of words in our land will be a disaster spiritually, I am afraid. Because God has given us His truth (even the part of it that is story) not in pictures, but in words. And in a culture that incessantly prefers pictures to words, where will that leave us in a generation or two? Not in a good place, I am afraid. The Bible will lie more and more neglected. And so will preaching and good Christian books. Because we want images more than words; media players more than monologues; infographics more than essays; performers more than prophets.

Prior to the Protestant Reformation, the Bible was kept locked in Latin, the tongue of the scholars (with translation into the common peoples’ languages forbidden). Meanwhile the church gave the people pictures (statues, relics, paintings, etc.) in place of words. And, while these visual media lacked ability to communicate the whole truth about God (as stated above), they were (and still are) quite proficient at serving as stand-ins for Him; at becoming idols, in other words. And, although not precisely in the same way, pictures often stand between men and God today, too … wooing us away from the written word, more rapidly exciting our affections, but unable to provide us the same level of food for thought or meat for the soul.

And so I am making a plea for the place of words in your life. I’m not suggesting you never watch a movie (we have some in our church library!), or that you never turn on the television, or that you close your Instagram account. But what I am saying is that you will be much the poorer – spiritually, mentally, and in terms of your understanding of the world – if you adopt film, and television, and YouTube, and social media imagery as your primary source of mental intake.

So ask yourself: When is the last time I read a book all the way through? Or, even more so, when is the last time I read a Christian book all the way through? And how many movies have I watched in that same span of time? And further, do I have the attention span to focus on more than just a few verses of the Bible at a time? God has chosen to communicate to us in words … but is my mental lifestyle conducive to receiving His truth in the way He has chosen to disseminate it?

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For more on the cultural shift from words to pictures, see Neil Postman’s seminal work Amusing Ourselves to Death, to which I owe most of the thinking above.

'What the Bible means to me'

Sometimes you may hear a person voice something like this, say, in a Bible study or Sunday School class: ‘Let me tell you what this passage means to me.’ Often times such people are well intentioned. And some of them would agree with everything I am about to write. They just aren’t being careful with their wording – using the word means when perhaps they really mean to say applies (see below).

But there is a danger, when we use ill-advised words like the above, that we could communicate (or even believe), that a given biblical passage might actually mean one thing to you, and something slightly different to me. And that is a danger, I say! Because, under this style of interpretation, the biblical text, and the vision of God and His world that flows from it, become just a piece of clay in the reader’s hand … reshaped according to his or her own background, and beliefs, and sometimes fancy. And the reader may not even realize that’s what he or she is doing! Because we all have biases and preconceived notions that we bring to any given situation. But if we give credence to the idea that the Bible might just mean something different to one person than to another … we won’t feel nearly as much need to look past our biases, and to discover what the author actually meant by what he wrote. For, since we believe the Bible might have different meanings for different people, we’re already defaulting to looking for ‘what this passage means to me.’ And that’s no way to read anyone’s book, let alone God’s!

The meaning of a given piece of text belongs with the author, not the reader! That’s why Paul tells Timothy, not to discover what the text means to him, but to “be diligent” about “accurately handling the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15). The whole idea of handling the text of the Bible “accurately” lets us know that it has a definite meaning that we must strive to get right!

Now, are there passages over which godly people have come to two (or more) very different interpretations of the text? Absolutely. But, if we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that, if you think passage X means this, and I think it means that … well then, one (or both) of us will someday discover that we were incorrect! Because, while we may not agree on the meaning of passage X, we do agree that it has a definite meaning. And so we understand and accept the fact that our divergence is one of our interpretation, not of the Bible’s actual meaning.

We also recognize that a given biblical passage might have a different application for one person than another, given that person’s circumstances. So that, for instance, an American Christian and a North Korean Christian might read the same psalm about persecution, and yet put it into immediate practice in different ways – the American (rightly) turning it into prayer for his persecuted brothers in places like North Korea, and into preparation for the suffering that may be ahead in this land; and the North Korean (also rightly) praying the words of David directly about his own very present suffering. But the meaning of the words on the page are the same for both readers. They are, in either case, a description of how David prayed in a time of suffering, and an example of how Christians should pray in the same situations. And so the difference between the American and the North Korean has to do with their application of the text, not with the text’s actual meaning.

In short, the Bible means what the Author intended it to mean – always. The meaning of any given book, chapter, sentence, or individual biblical word does not change, has not changed, and will not change … no matter who reads it, or when, or under what circumstances. And so no passage of scripture can mean one thing to you, and another to me. One or both of us may interpret it incorrectly, so as to think it means something different than what it really means. But that doesn’t change the actual meaning. And, when we have the meaning correct, we may rightly apply the same truth in different ways, given our circumstances. But the words on the page still mean what they mean – always.

So let’s be careful about how we talk about the meaning of the Bible. Let’s learn to say: ‘This is how I believe this passage applies in my life’ rather than ‘this is what this passage means to me.’ Or, ‘This is what I believe this passage means (period)’ instead of ‘This is what this passage means to me.’

And let’s also be okay with admitting, when two of us have differing interpretations of a given text, that at least one of us is wrong. We don’t have to battle it to the death, of course! And, if the difference is not over a cardinal doctrine of the faith, we need not part ways over our different interpretations. But neither must we go to the opposite (21st century Western) extreme of saying: ‘Well, you have your truth, and I have mine. And we can both be right.’ It’s okay, in other words, to agree that the text has a definite meaning, and that we are not agreed on what that meaning is! But it’s not okay to talk as though any given Bible passage may mean different things to different people.