One time, moving stuff to Atlanta I rented a U-Haul.  Goodness, those things can be disasters sometimes.  Well, I got one that looked pretty good.  It was only when I got it out on the highway that a problem arose.  The thing had a governor on it.  You know, some kind of device that won’t let you go over a certain speed limit. 

Well, this U-Haul had one.  And, even though the speed limits had changed, going up to 70 this one’s governor was at 58 mpg.  Here’s how I know.  See, I thought governors merely capped the throttle.  Like, you’d hit whatever speed it was set on and, even if you were mashing the gas, it just wouldn’t accelerate any further. 

Not how they work.

You hit the limit speed on the governor and it shuts down the throttle, entirely.  As it, you can’t accelerate until it releases which, in the case of this U-Haul, happened at 50 miles per hour.

That meant that, should the truck ever hit 58, it would shut down until you were under 50.  On that highway, it was dangerous.  Getting going only to slow back down confuses other drivers and makes for an anxious trip.  To be honest, in the U-Haul, I was a danger to myself and others.

I use that as an opening because, well, right now, Christianity in the West isn’t going so great.  Our numbers are dropping as they have been for decades now.  I see a lot of churches trying to turn the tide but, just like that U-Haul, they get to a certain speed, and then, to use a different image, the wind drops out of their sails.  They slow down. Some even die. 

  It’s like they’ve got a governor on.  They can only go so far and so fast. 

 If I were to guess the nature of what prevents the church of really getting going in the face of current events, I wouldn’t call out some of the usual suspects.  Instead, what keeps us from really going all out, our governor, so to speak, is the laity’s knowledge of the Word.      

The Word is akin to an infinite palate of colors which we God’s children can use to paint glorious testimonies of praise to our Lord.  Some colors are as bright and sunny as a summer day, warm and inviting.  Still other hues strike dark and ominous.  All of them, from Aquamarine to Magenta to midnight black, are the primary and certain means by which God is revealed to us.    

But there’s an important caveat.

Our interpretations of God’s Word are, and always shall be, dynamic.  But don’t miss this, the source material stays the same.  This is a blessing to the faithful for we can look at something solid.  Rock upon which to build.  But that fixity, certainty, well, it doesn’t easily yield itself.  The Bible is 66 books, written across hundreds of years by different authors in diverse settings. 

That is to say that I am not unaware that reading the Bible and truly living in it is an easy proposition.  No, your journey with the Bible isn’t always going to be sunshine and roses.  Getting to truly know the Word can honestly feel difficult.  So many of our presuppositions, our faith beliefs even, aren’t as in align with the Word as we may think.  Reading the Word can jostle you around.

But the opposite, remaining ignorant, we can find ourselves unwittingly participating in the greatest con-job the world has ever known.  Because you see, if you listen to the voices of the world around us, the Bible is a silly thing, filled with great errors and backwardness.  It isn’t sufficiently progressive, I guess you could say.  Worse, if you take someone else’s word for what the Bible actually says, as opposed to knowing the source material, so to speak.