He Came Home With Words

The boy is nineteen and he is a good boy and none of this is his fault.

He came back at Christmas from his second term with a way of talking that Duncan has never heard in his own kitchen. Not showing off. He is not that sort and he never was. He is genuinely excited about what he is learning and he wants to tell somebody, and the somebody is his grandfather, because that is who he has always told everything.

And he used a word, twice, in the same sentence, that Duncan does not know.

Duncan nodded. He has been nodding since Boxing Day.

He is seventy-one. He left school at fifteen. He has been in that church since he was married and there have been years when he was the one they came to, and he has sat with more dying people than his grandson has met.

And he has gone quiet at his own table.

Not sulking. He would be appalled at the suggestion and it is not that. It is simpler and harder to say: he has nothing to add now. When the conversation goes where it goes, he finds himself waiting for it to come back round to something he can be in, and if it does not come round he says something about the dog.

His wife noticed in about March. She has not said anything, and she does not have to, because she has started asking him questions at the table in a particular way, and he has noticed her noticing.

That is the part he minds.

And in June he thought a thing he has never let himself think in fifty years, which is that maybe what he has is a smaller version of what that boy is getting, and that the boy will have the whole of it by thirty.

And you may know that table. Somebody younger and dearly loved may have come home with words, and you may have started talking about the dog.

What a hostile council noticed about two unschooled men

Let me take something off you before anything else, because you have carried it since Boxing Day and it is not yours.

You do not have a smaller version. You never did. Scripture puts two unschooled men in front of the most educated council available and records exactly what those men were noticed for, and it is the Holy Spirit, not vocabulary, who puts anything in anybody. Set it down here at this table. It is heavy and it has been on you since Christmas.

Now hear it, and hear who is doing the noticing.

Peter and John have been arrested and are standing in front of the council: the rulers, the elders, the teachers of the law, the whole apparatus. These are men who have spent their lives in it and are not easily impressed and are not on Peter's side.

When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus.Acts 4:13

Unschooled, ordinary men.

That is not the writer being modest on their behalf. That is what the council saw, and the council would have known, because assessing that was their trade.

And what they took note of was not an argument. It was that these men had been with Jesus, which is not something you can get out of a book and is not something a nineteen year old has more of because of a second term.

Being with Him is the currency in that sentence, and you have been at it for fifty years.

That is written, and His Spirit is the one who does that work in a man, and He has never once handed it out on the strength of schooling.

Now let me be careful here, because there is a ditch on this side and I have no intention of putting you in it.

Nothing here says your grandson is going the wrong way or that what he is learning is hot air. It is not. He is being taught by people who have given their lives to it, and some of what he brings home will hold him up in a decade you will not see, and Scripture is full of learning and God gives it.

Be glad about the boy. He came to you first, which tells you what he thinks of you.

And nothing here says you should not learn the word. Ask him what it means. He would be delighted and it would be the best thing that happened to him all year.

The point is only that Scripture records what a hostile expert council actually noticed, and it was not the vocabulary, and His Spirit is the one who put that in you across fifty years.

Here is the plain part, and I will say it as you would want it. The thing you thought in June is wrong, and it is the only wrong thing in this whole business.

You do not have a smaller version of what he is getting. You have a different thing, older, made out of dying people and long Sundays and a marriage, and it is not on the syllabus and he cannot get it at nineteen at any price. That is what Scripture says the council saw, and His Spirit is the one who built it.