Blogging in Christ — Issue 2

Your Own Ground

Every writer must decide where his words will live. The age offers him rooms to rent: pages on another man's ground, under another man's rules, kept up only while the landlord finds him useful. The terms can change overnight. The door can close without warning. The whole house can be taken down, and everything stored in it goes down with it. A man who builds only on rented ground has built nothing he can keep.

The herald builds otherwise. He keeps his own ground, and he lets copies travel. The home copy stands whole under his own hand. Copies may go anywhere, because a copy is expendable and the word is not. That order — home first, copies second — is not a strategy for reach. It is the shape of a word that cannot be chained.

Paul wrote it from chains. "in which I suffer hardship to the point of chains as a criminal. But God's word isn't chained." (2 Tim 2:9) The man is bound, and the word is not. The apostle's body can be locked in a cell and his movements stopped, and none of it binds what he was sent to speak. The word moves where the man cannot go. Therefore the writer's ground does not finally rest on any platform's permission. No landlord grants the word its freedom, and no landlord can revoke it.

That is why the ground under the writing matters. "Everyone therefore who hears these words of mine and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it didn't fall, for it was founded on the rock. Everyone who hears these words of mine and doesn't do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. The rain came down, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it fell—and its fall was great." (Matt 7:24-27) The storm is the ordinary weather of a world that changes its mind: fashions pass, terms change, crowds move on. A house on another man's land stands only at another man's leave. When the leave is withdrawn, the house is gone, however well it was furnished.

Therefore the first work is not decoration but foundation. "Unless Yahweh builds the house, they who build it labor in vain. Unless Yahweh watches over the city, the watchman guards it in vain." (Ps 127:1) The writer secures his ground by building on what Yahweh has already settled. "Yahweh, your word is settled in heaven forever." (Ps 119:89) "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away." (Matt 24:35) Build there, and the storm can beat on the house without taking it.

The burning of Jeremiah's scroll proves the same truth from the other side. The king heard the words, cut the scroll with a penknife, and threw it column by column into the fire until the whole scroll was consumed. "When Jehudi had read three or four columns, the king cut it with the penknife, and cast it into the fire that was in the brazier, until all the scroll was consumed in the fire that was in the brazier." (Jer 36:23) The king burned the copy. He could not burn the word. "Then Yahweh's word came to Jeremiah, after the king had burned the scroll, and the words which Baruch wrote at the mouth of Jeremiah, saying, 'Take again another scroll, and write in it all the former words that were in the first scroll, which Jehoiakim the king of Judah has burned.'" (Jer 36:27-28) So the scroll was written again, and more was added: "Then Jeremiah took another scroll, and gave it to Baruch the scribe, the son of Neriah, who wrote therein from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the book which Jehoiakim king of Judah had burned in the fire; and many similar words were added to them." (Jer 36:32) A copy can be burned, banned, deleted, or lost, and the loss is real but not final. The word returns, because the word was never identical with the copy that carried it.

Then let the copies travel. That is the true shape of what the age calls distribution, and it belongs to God, not to the writer's machinery. When persecution scattered the church, no committee planned the spread. "Therefore those who were scattered abroad went around preaching the word." (Acts 8:4) The scattering was suffering, and the preaching was the word traveling with scattered men. No one built the road. The road was the scattering itself, and the word walked it.

For the same reason the spread of the word is prayed for, not manufactured. "Finally, brothers, pray for us, that the word of the Lord may spread rapidly and be glorified, even as also with you," (2 Thess 3:1) He asks them to pray that it may run, and be glorified where it runs. The writer's part is the smaller, faithful part: to sow. "The farmer sows the word." (Mark 4:14) The farmer does not engineer the soil, command the rain, or force the seed. He sows, and the seed does its work where it falls. Copies travel the same way. They are seed scattered, not nets cast to haul a catch.

This order also frees the writer from the fear that keeps so many men renting rooms they do not own. If his whole work lives on ground another man controls, every change of terms feels like an ending. If his work lives on his own ground, a closed door is only a closed door. The copy on the rented page may vanish, and the piece itself remains, whole, at home. The platforms are grass, whatever their size. "For, 'All flesh is like grass, and all of man's glory like the flower in the grass. The grass withers, and its flower falls; but the Lord's word endures forever.' This is the word of Good News which was preached to you." (1 Pet 1:24-25) "The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God stands forever." (Isa 40:8) Build on grass, and you rebuild every season.

What then does the writer do, in practice, on his own ground? He writes the piece whole, in one place he holds, plain enough to be read by a man on the run. "Yahweh answered me, 'Write the vision, and make it plain on tablets, that he who runs may read it.'" (Hab 2:2) The tablet is the home copy: plain, standing, legible. The writer's job is to make it plain and leave it standing where it can be read. Then he may send copies wherever copies can go, without anxiety over which copy survives. The copy is not the treasure. The word is the treasure, and the treasure is kept at home.

Nor does keeping his own ground make the writer his own master. The ground is his to keep, not his to boast in. "I planted. Apollos watered. But God gave the increase. So then neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase." (1 Cor 3:6-7) The planting is real, the watering is real, and the increase belongs to God. The writer's ground is simply the field where he was set to plant. He tends it, keeps the copy whole, lets copies travel, and leaves the harvest to the Lord of the field. "Your word is a lamp to my feet, and a light for my path." (Ps 119:105) A lamp does not light the whole road at once. It lights the next step. So the writer walks by it, one plain piece at a time, on ground that will still be there tomorrow.

Keep your own ground, then. Write the piece whole where you hold it. Let copies travel where they may, and do not grieve a burned copy as though the word had burned with it. The word is not chained. The word is settled in heaven. The word stands forever. The house built on it stands with it, and the copies that go out from it are seed in the hand of the Farmer who gives the increase.