and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.
2 Timothy 3:15 (NIV)
Able to Make You Wise
He hasn’t been inside a church since he was nine, and he can still say the whole of one psalm and about half of another. He didn’t choose to keep them and he can’t work out how to be rid of them. They turn up on their own, mostly in bad weeks, and they say things about God that he would not say about God now.
That is the whole of what he has. Nobody made him learn them; a woman in a hall with a piano had them all say it together on Wednesdays, and forty years later the words are still where she put them.
“And how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.” Paul sets that in front of a grown man with a church to run, in the middle of a warning about impostors who go from bad to worse.
Paul names one target for that wisdom, salvation, and one route to it, faith in Christ Jesus. What a small child takes in early can turn into that later on. Paul is writing to a man who had them from a child and had still had to come to faith himself.
Able is the word to sit with. Paul does not say the knowing does it, or that it does it on any particular schedule. He says the Scriptures are able to, and then he says through what: faith in Christ Jesus. Timothy had them from infancy and he still had to come to that.
So what a child was given can lie in him for decades doing nothing anybody can see, and it is not inert. It is the only thing in him that did not come out of him.
In March he wrote four lines of it out on the back of a delivery note, to see whether he had them right. He had them right. The note is in a drawer and he has not looked at it since and has not thrown it out.
He still doesn’t know what he thinks. The psalm is older than what he thinks, and it has not changed a word in forty years, and it is in there in a Wednesday-afternoon voice he could pick out of a room.
A Prayer to Remember
Father, do in me what you say the Holy Scriptures can do, and bring me to salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. What went into me early, bring it up whole. And where somebody put words in a child this week, bless the putting, even if neither of them lives to see what it does.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
