People of the Book

Nehemiah 8:1–9

When the captives came home to Jerusalem after their long exile in Babylon, they did remarkable things. They rebuilt the temple. They raised the walls of the ruined city. But maybe the most important thing they did to rebuild the city of God is right here in Nehemiah 8. Ezra stood on a platform of wood, opened the book of the law, and read it aloud to the people, from morning until midday, and the ears of all the people were attentive.

There are certain prerequisites to any move of renewal, certain things the ground must have before revival can grow. One of them, and maybe the deepest of them, is the word of God. Scripture is the foundation of revival. You will never find a true revival that is not tied to the recovery of some cardinal truth that had been buried, obscured, forgotten across the long seasons of decline. The Spirit conspired with human authors to write the Bible, and the Spirit only graces his own truth.

So of all the things we might do to position ourselves for renewal, few are more essential than examining our regard for the scriptures. Are they our authority, our daily nourishment, or merely a nice resource for our spiritual lives? Jesus said man shall not live on bread alone but on every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord. We are children of a suspicious age, trained, whether we know it or not, to sit in judgment over every text set before us, including this one. That posture has never yet led anyone into revival. Revival runs the other direction. It is the church waking up to find she has drifted from the word, and coming back under it.

Watch how often the pattern repeats. Ezra reading to the returned exiles. Josiah's men uncovering the book of the law amid the dust of a neglected temple. Luther, centuries on, recovering justification by faith and the authority of scripture. In my own tradition, born in the Swedish revivals of the 1840s, the Lutherans who experienced renewal made their first question: where is it written? Every revival, the same pattern. A people re-discovering the book. Revival is always tied to the recovery, the illumination, the coming alive of the word of God. 

Every building needs a foundation, and a shoddy one topples in time. Scripture is the foundation. We need the Spirit to open our minds, the way he opened the minds of the two on the Emmaus road and the eleven gathered in the room. He breathes on the word, but that means we must hear the word. We have to be in the scriptures, reading them, chewing on them, meditating on them. We have to give the Spirit something to work with.

When we pray for revival, we might as well be praying for minds trained by scripture. Preaching that is soundly biblical. Young people to discover and know and love the book. We are praying for the people of God to become, as they did under Ezra the scribe, a people of the Book. 

Rev. Greg Johnson
Director, Revive New England