Blogging in Christ — Issue 6

The Reader God Sends

Every writer asks who his piece is for. The question sounds practical, and it quickly becomes a master. Once the writer has named his reader — his age, his tastes, his worries, his level — the piece begins to bend toward that figure. Sentences are chosen to keep him. Difficulties are softened so he will stay. The subject itself is trimmed to fit the shape he can receive. The writer set out to announce a word, and ends by serving a profile he invented.

The commission runs the other way. The writer does not choose his reader. The Lord sends him.

The anchor stands on a shore, after breakfast. "Jesus said to them, 'Come and eat breakfast!'" (John 21:12) The risen Lord fed His disciples before He charged them with anything. Only then came the threefold charge to Peter: "Feed my lambs." (John 21:15) "Tend my sheep." (John 21:16) "Feed my sheep." (John 21:17) The order governs the whole craft. The herald is fed first, and the feeding comes before the sending. A man who has not eaten cannot feed another, and a man who has eaten only to impress the table will serve his own hunger at the next man's expense.

Therefore the writer is himself the first reader after the Lord. This is not a theory of writing. It is the pattern of the prophets. "Your words were found, and I ate them. Your words were to me a joy and the rejoicing of my heart, for I am called by your name, Yahweh, God of Armies." (Jer 15:16) Ezekiel was given the same order, in plainer terms still: "Eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel." (Ezek 3:1) Eating precedes speaking. The word must pass through the writer's own mouth and belly before it passes from his pen to another man.

Paul gives the same charge to Timothy, and it names both hearers at once: "Pay attention to yourself and to your teaching. Continue in these things, for in doing this you will save both yourself and those who hear you." (1 Tim 4:16) Yourself first, then your teaching, then those who hear you — and the saving of both hangs together. The writer who attends only to his hearers, and never to himself, has reversed the verse. He polishes the teaching while the teacher goes unfed. The writer who attends to himself and to the teaching, and continues in both, writes a piece that can feed another because it has first fed him.

Yet even a fed writer does not gather his own flock. The sheep come by another hand. "My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me." (John 10:27) Hearing is the mark, not applause, not agreement, not a number on a page. The sheep recognize the voice in the word, and they follow. The writer's task is not to make the voice attractive. It is to keep the voice unmuffled, so that what is heard is the Shepherd's, not the herald's imitation of Him.

For the coming itself is not the writer's achievement. "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him; and I will raise him up in the last day." (John 6:44) Drawing belongs to the Father. And the drawing does not fail of its object: "All those whom the Father gives me will come to me. He who comes to me I will in no way throw out." (John 6:37) Here the inversion stands at the root. The common craft teaches the writer to attract a reader: to study him, to speak his language, to lower the fence until he wanders in. Scripture teaches the writer to feed the sheep, and leaves the drawing to the Father. Attraction is the writer pulling a stranger toward himself. Drawing is the Father bringing His own to His Son. The two movements look alike from a distance, and they are opposite at the center. One ends in a crowd around the writer. The other ends in a flock around the Shepherd.

This is why the writer must not reshape the feed to win those who do not come. "But you don't believe, because you are not of my sheep, as I told you." (John 10:26) Some will read and not believe, and their unbelief is not evidence that the piece failed, nor that the feed was wrong. At the same time he does not fence his piece to a party he has chosen, for the Shepherd has sheep the writer has not yet seen: "I have other sheep which are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will hear my voice. They will become one flock with one shepherd." (John 10:16) The writer does not know the whole roll. He therefore writes truly and plainly, and leaves the gathering to the One who knows every sheep by name.

Against this stands the shepherd who feeds himself. "Woe to the shepherds of Israel who feed themselves! Shouldn’t the shepherds feed the sheep?" (Ezek 34:2) Audience-chasing is self-feeding with a pious name. The writer studies what readers want, writes what readers want, and calls the result service — but the table he has set is his own. The appetite being fed is his appetite: for notice, for growth, for the comfort of being wanted. Peter's counter-charge names the same snare in the work of oversight: "shepherd the flock of God which is among you, exercising the oversight, not under compulsion, but voluntarily; not for dishonest gain, but willingly; not as lording it over those entrusted to you, but making yourselves examples to the flock." (1 Pet 5:2-3) Note the phrase: the flock of God which is among you. The sheep are not the writer's property, and they are not his market. They are God's, and they are among him for a season. He tends what is entrusted, he does not harvest what he owns.

The Lord, not the writer, also keeps the count. "The Lord added to the assembly day by day those who were being saved." (Acts 2:47) The adding is the Lord's verb, and the day-by-day pace is His. The writer's verbs are smaller, and they are enough: "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) Planting and watering are real work, and they are nothing beside the increase. A writer who counts readers as his increase has taken God's verb for his own. A writer who plants truly and waters plainly, and then leaves the number alone, has kept each verb in its proper hand.

What, then, does the writer ask before he writes, if he no longer asks whom he is targeting? He asks three questions, in this order. First, is this true to the text under it, verified and not remembered? Second, have I eaten it myself — does it feed me, convict me, steady me, before it ever reaches another? Third, is it stated plainly enough that a sheep who hears it can recognize the voice in it? If the answer to all three is yes, the piece is ready, whether one man reads it or a thousand, whether it is read this week or found years later by a reader the writer never imagined. The word is not chained to the writer's lifetime or his circle: "But God's word isn't chained." (2 Tim 2:9) A piece left standing can be sent where the writer cannot go, to a reader the writer never named.

So the writer writes for the reader God sends, beginning with himself. He eats first. He feeds the sheep who come. He refuses to lure, to flatter, to fence, or to count. He leaves the drawing to the Father, the knowing to the Shepherd, and the adding to the Lord. The voice in the piece is not his own, and the flock it gathers is not his own. That is the freedom of the herald's craft: he need not invent his audience, because his audience was never his to invent. "Feed my sheep." The sheep will hear. The Shepherd will bring them. The writer's part is to set the feed truly, and to trust the hand that sends the reader to it.