Reading and hearing the Word

This week's questions

How is the Word to be read and heard, that it may become effectual to salvation? That the Word may become effectual to salvation, we must attend thereunto with diligence, preparation, and prayer; receive it with faith and love, lay it up in our hearts, and practice it in our lives.

Question 90

Question 89 told what the Spirit does by the Word (last week); Question 90 tells what we who read and hear are to do. The Spirit's work and our diligence do not compete. This is the catechism's last question on the Word; the sacraments begin next week.

Before, during and after

The seven things Question 90 names fall into three times: before we hear, while we hear, and after.

Before, there is diligence, preparation and prayer. Wisdom blesses the one who listens, "watching daily at my doors" (Proverbs 8:34). Diligence is less one great resolve than standing at that door day after day. For preparation, Peter writes in the first proof text:

Rid yourselves, therefore, of all malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander. Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation

1 Peter 2:1-2

A hunger for the Word grows as malice and envy are laid down; a heart still nursing a quarrel hears poorly. The next proof text is a prayer: "Open my eyes that I may see wondrous things from Your law" (Psalm 119:18). The Larger Catechism asks us to read the Scriptures "with a firm persuasion that they are the very word of God, and that he only can enable us to understand them" Larger Catechism, Q. 157.

While we hear, there is faith and love. Hebrews says of the wilderness generation that the message they heard "was of no value to them, since they did not share the faith of those who comprehended it" (Hebrews 4:2). The same Word, heard without faith, does no good. Paul warns of those who perish "because they refused the love of the truth that would have saved them" (2 Thessalonians 2:10). To receive the truth with love is to welcome not only the words we like, but the words that correct us. Hearing also weighs what is heard by Scripture: the Bereans received the message eagerly and "examined the Scriptures every day to see if these teachings were true" (Acts 17:11).

After, there is laying up and doing. The psalmist says, "I have hidden Your word in my heart that I might not sin against You" (Psalm 119:11), and Mary "treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart" (Luke 2:19). In another proof text James sets the one who glances in a mirror and forgets beside the one who looks into the perfect law of freedom, "not being a forgetful hearer, but an effective doer" (James 1:25). The Larger Catechism asks those who hear sermons to meditate on what they heard and to "confer of it", that is, to talk it over Q. 160. Sharing one sentence of the sermon over Sunday lunch is one way to do it.

The parable of the sower

The three times meet in one parable. The seed is the Word of God, and the same seed falls on the path, on rock, among thorns and on good soil (Luke 8:4-15). The third proof text explains the good soil:

But the seeds on good soil are those with a noble and good heart, who hear the word, cling to it, and by persevering produce a crop.

Luke 8:15

They do not stop at hearing: they cling to the Word and bear fruit with patience. Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, says that the good ground is "the honest and good hearts which receive deeply the seeds of the word, and retain them and cherish them" Cyril of Alexandria. And after the parable the Lord warns, "Pay attention, therefore, to how you listen" (Luke 8:18). The English minister Matthew Henry finds all three times here: we are "to take heed lest we hear carelessly and slightly, lest we entertain prejudices against the word we hear; and to take heed to our spirits after we have heard the word, lest we lose what we have gained" Matthew Henry.

The slow, ruminating reading of Scripture is an old path of the whole church. Guigo II's twelfth-century ladder of reading, meditation, prayer and contemplation Guigo II, The Ladder of Monks is climbed by many Protestants today; Martin Luther named prayer, meditation and trial as the way to study theology Luther, Preface to his German Writings. Both are taught in A life of daily reading and Reading with prayer and the Spirit's light, in the How to Read the Bible course, and how to look closely at a text in Observation. For first steps, see Starting to read the Bible and How should we read the Bible?

To ponder this week

How will you prepare to hear the Word this Lord's Day, and what one thing from it will you do on Monday? Rest a little earlier on Saturday night, and before the service pray Psalm 119:18. Write down one thing from the sermon that stays with you, and take one step with it on Monday. If some weeks you manage none of this, take heart: the good soil bears fruit by persevering.

Practice