I was thirty-four years old the first time I opened a Bible and read it for myself.
I got saved at twelve. That is twenty-two years between the prayer and the page.
Here is what I had instead.
TULIP was written in the front of my Bible. I believed a man was graveyard dead until the Holy Spirit came and breathed on him. I believed women should wear dresses. I believed no family had any business in a restaurant with a bar in it. Certain brands were off limits for promoting wickedness. I believed good preaching was measured by how loud a man could shout and how long his list of rules ran.
I knew the Bible as arguing points and alliterated sayings. I could hold my end of a fight over it. I could tell you what it meant.
I had not read the book.
I got kicked out of school at fourteen. Then several months committed to a mental institution. When I came out of that, it was St. Joseph’s, a Catholic school run by nuns. There was no Bible in the place. We started with the saint of the day. Then Latin. Then basic studies. Wednesdays we walked to the church and did the stations of the cross. The nuns were sweet ladies who put up with us every day of the week.
After that, a small Christian school in the mountains. An old pastor ran it with his wife and his daughter. They were kind. Christ was magnified there, and He was preached as personal. A Jesus who could and would change a life. That was not nothing. That stuck.
The music was another matter. God’s music was hymns and bluegrass gospel. What I loved was Pink Floyd. David Bowie. Billy Idol. ZZ Top. Van Halen. Lynyrd Skynyrd. Ozzy Osbourne. Mötley Crüe. I was at war in myself most of the time. It did give me a different set of eyes than the men grading me.
Then the Bible institute. Charles Stanley had taught there decades before I got there, and he pastored the church across the street. His books were still on the shelf in the library. I remember the warning printed on his books in the library.
“Warning: this man has been divorced and has thus disqualified himself from full time service.”
That was the water I swam in. A man’s whole ministry, settled on a label, and I never once thought to go look it up for myself.
I married. Two children. We moved to Montana to help start a church. I worked three jobs. Three more born out there. Five in all. A decade inside fundamentalism. I served. I attended. I taught.
I had still not opened the book and read it for myself.
I want to be careful here, because there is an easy version of this story where I am the victim of somebody. That version is a lie. Nobody locked the book. It sat in my house the entire time. It was in my hand at every service. The Bible did not hide from me for twenty-two years. I handed it to other men and never asked for it back.
That is the confession. Not that I was lied to. That I was content to be told.
Then Mandan and Bismarck, North Dakota. Straight Bible teaching and preaching for the first time. Not arguing points. Not alliterated sayings. Not a man shouting a list of rules. Somebody opened the book and read what it said and then said what it meant, and the two things matched.
“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” John 8:32
I opened the book. It was true the whole time. Everything I had been handed that was right was right, and it was better than I had been told. Everything I had been handed that was wrong fell off in the first year of reading, and nobody had to argue me out of it.
If you have been in church your whole life and have never read it for yourself, you already know it. You have felt it during a sermon you agreed with. Do something about it tonight. Open it to Genesis 1 and read until you are tired. Not a devotional. Not a study guide. Not somebody’s podcast about it. The book, in your own hands, at your own kitchen table.
You do not need me for that part. You do not need anybody.
If you want a map for the questions that come up in the first month, I made one. A hundred questions, the question first, then the verse as it sits, then a plain answer. Five dollar floor, pay what you want. https://deadhidden.org/store/100-plain-questions
Twenty-two years is a long time to carry a book you never opened. Don’t be like me.
-Adam
