Two heartbroken travelers on the Emmaus road didn’t recognize Jesus by sight—but their hearts caught fire long before their eyes opened.
Burning Hearts Series
“Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?” — Luke 24:32
It is the afternoon of the first Easter Sunday. The greatest event in the history of the world has already happened — the stone is rolled away, the tomb is empty, death itself has been beaten — and two men are walking in the wrong direction. They are leaving Jerusalem on the seven-mile road out to a village called Emmaus, and they have no idea that the day they are trudging through is the day on which everything turns.
Look at them as they go. Luke says they were “talking with each other about everything that had happened” (Luke 24:14), and a little further on that their faces were “downcast” (Luke 24:17). Their heads are down. Their hopes are lying in a borrowed grave back in the city behind them. And their conversation has that slow, circling quality that grief always has — going over the same ground, asking the same questions, arriving at the same dead ends, and then starting around again. You have walked that road yourself. Some of you walked part of it this week.
Listen to the saddest words they manage to say. When the stranger asks them what they are talking about, they stop dead in the road — Luke says they stood still, heads bowed with grief — and one of them, a man named Cleopas, pours the whole thing out, and right in the middle of it there is this: “we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21). We had hoped. There is a whole landscape of disappointment folded into those words. We thought He was the one. We staked everything we had on Him. We left our nets and our tables and our old lives to follow Him. And now He is dead, and our hope is buried in the ground with Him.
Now watch what the stranger does, because it is the pattern for everything we are going to learn together in this book. He does not scold them for being sad. He does not announce who He is. He simply falls into step beside them. He walks at their pace, in their direction, for a while. He asks them questions, real questions, and then He is quiet and lets them talk themselves all the way down to the bottom. And only then, when they are empty and have nothing left to say, He opens the Book to them: “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself” (Luke 24:27).
He opened the Book to them. That is the phrase to carry with you through everything that follows. And while He was doing it, something began to happen inside those two men that they could not name at the time. Their eyes “were kept from recognizing him” (Luke 24:16) — they did not recognize His face — but underneath the recognition, down in a deeper place than the eyes can reach, a fire was quietly being lit.
There is one more detail before the fire breaks into the open, and I do not want you to miss it. When they come near to the village, “Jesus continued on as if he were going farther” (Luke 24:28). He does not force Himself on them. He acts as if He will walk on past, and they have to urge Him — “Stay with us,” they say, “for it is nearly evening.” The Lord waits to be asked. He will walk the road beside a man for miles, opening the Scriptures to him, and still leave him free to say good night at the door, or to say, “Come in.” He never breaks down the door of a heart. He waits to be invited in.
So they invite Him in, and He goes in to eat with them, and there at the table He takes bread, gives thanks, breaks it, and hands it to them — and in that instant “their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight” (Luke 24:31). And the two of them are left sitting in that suddenly empty room, and they turn and look at one another, and out comes the line this whole book is built upon: “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32).
Now I want you to notice something, because it is the easiest thing in the world to read straight past. What set those two hearts on fire was not a vision. It was not a miracle. It was not even, in the moment it was happening, the sight of the risen Christ — because they did not yet know it was Him. What set their hearts on fire was an open Bible, explained to them by the Lord Himself. And the news I want you to take hold of is this: the same risen Christ wants to do the very same thing, with the very same Book, on the road you are walking right now.
But before we learn how to read this Book, and how to find Christ on every page of it, we need to settle a more basic question first. What kind of Book is this that we are holding? Why does an open Bible do something to a human heart that no other book on the face of the earth has ever been able to do? I want to give you three answers to carry with you. This Book endures. This Book comforts. And this Book ignites.
It Endures
Let us begin here, because this is the most public fact about the Bible, and it is the one its enemies keep forgetting. No book in the history of the world has been loved like this one — and no book has ever been hated like it either. It has been outlawed by emperors and burned by tyrants. It has been mocked by the clever and quietly buried by the confident. Men have set out, in deadly earnest, with all the power of the state at their backs, to scrub it off the face of the earth. And every single time, when the smoke has cleared and the dust has settled and the great men have died, there it is again — still being opened, still being read, still doing its work. Three witnesses tell us why.
The prophet Isaiah spoke to a people about to lose everything — their city, their temple, their freedom — and told them where to fix their hope instead:
The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever. — Isaiah 40:8
You have to hear where Isaiah is standing when he says that. Chapter 40 is the great chapter of comfort. It opens, “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.” And it is spoken to people who are about to be carried off into exile in Babylon. Babylon was the superpower of the age. Its walls looked eternal. Its empire looked as though it would stand for a thousand years. And into all of that, God tells His frightened people to look at the grass. In that part of the world the grass springs up green and lovely after the rains, and then the hot wind blows in off the desert for a single day, and by evening it is brown and dead. That, says God, is your Babylon. That is the empire you are so afraid of. That is every power that ever made you tremble. Grass. The flowers fall. But — and everything hangs on that one small word — the word of our God endures forever.
Now bring that home, because Isaiah is not simply giving a lesson in botany. Everything you are carrying today is grass. The diagnosis is grass. The debt is grass. The relationship that is breaking your heart, the fear that woke you at two in the morning and would not let you sleep again — all of it real, all of it heavy, and all of it grass. It will wither. The day is coming when it will be brown and gone. But the Book in your lap is not grass. It will still be standing when the green hills outside your window have turned brown for the last time. So build your life on the thing that endures, and not on the thing that falls.
And there is something here worth pausing on. That very verse went on to prove itself. Seven hundred years after Isaiah wrote those words, the apostle Peter is writing to a little scattering of frightened Christians under persecution, and to encourage them he reaches back and quotes this exact text: “The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord endures forever” (1 Peter 1:24–25). The verse that promised the word would endure had itself endured — crossed seven centuries and a language, and arrived intact in Peter’s hand to do its comforting work all over again. The promise kept proving itself simply by still being there to be quoted.
Jesus Himself made the same promise, and made it at the unlikeliest moment imaginable:
“Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.” — Matthew 24:35
Consider where He is when He says it. He is sitting on the Mount of Olives, looking across the Kidron Valley at the temple — the most magnificent religious building in that whole part of the world — and He has just told His stunned disciples that not one stone of it will be left standing on another. And then He makes a claim so enormous that we tend to read straight past it without flinching. A carpenter from a small town in Galilee, with no army, no money, no office behind Him, a man who will be dead within the week, looks up at the whole created order — the sky above His head, the solid ground beneath His feet — and says that all of it will go before a single word of His does. Put that sentence in any other mouth in human history and it is the raving of a madman. But the temple He was looking at that afternoon has been a heap of rubble for nearly two thousand years, and the words He spoke are being read today in more languages and more places than any other words ever spoken by anyone.
Think of all the words that were supposed to be immortal and are gone. The great library of Alexandria, which once held the gathered learning of the whole ancient world, is dust; we do not even know for certain how it perished. The proud inscriptions of kings who carved their names in stone so they would never be forgotten lie face-down in the sand, and we cannot read half of them. The words men were sure would last have crumbled, and the words of a Galilean carpenter, which men were sure would be forgotten by the next market day, have outlasted empires.
And men have tested that promise with fire. In the year 303, the Emperor Diocletian launched the most savage persecution the church had yet known, and among his first edicts was a command that every copy of the Christian Scriptures be hunted out and burned. He thought he could end it in the flames. Within a decade, that same empire had a Christian emperor, Constantine, who granted the church freedom to worship openly. Within a generation, he was commissioning fifty fine copies of those very Scriptures for the churches of his new capital. One generation tried to burn the Book out of existence. The next paid good money to reproduce it by the dozen. Heaven and earth will pass away. His words will not.
The psalmist — the author of one of the Bible’s many prayers and songs to God — reaches higher still, and fixes the word somewhere no emperor’s hand and no tyrant’s fire can ever reach:
Your word, LORD, is eternal; it stands firm in the heavens. — Psalm 119:89
Psalm 119 is the longest chapter in the whole Bible — one hundred and seventy-six verses — and very nearly every one of them is about the word of God. And right at the heart of it the psalmist says something whose full weight we easily miss. He does not say God’s word is settled on the earth, where edicts can ban it and fires can reach it and damp caves can rot it. He says it stands firm in the heavens — fixed there, established there, beyond the reach of any emperor’s hand or any tyrant’s torch. And what stands firm in the heavens cannot be toppled on the earth, no matter how many men try.
You can watch God doing exactly that — keeping His word safe over our heads while men did their worst to it under their feet. William Tyndale was strangled and then burned at the stake in 1536 for the crime of translating this Book into plain English so that, as he said, even a boy who drove the plow might know the Scriptures better than the learned clergy did. His last recorded prayer, spoken at the stake, was, “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.” Within just a few years that very king had ordered an English Bible — built largely on Tyndale’s own translation — to be placed in every parish church in the land. They killed the translator. They could not kill the translation.
Or come forward to 1947, to a Bedouin boy out chasing a stray goat among the cliffs by the Dead Sea, who throws a stone into the dark mouth of a cave and hears, instead of stone on stone, the sound of pottery breaking. Inside were scrolls a thousand years older than any Old Testament manuscript we had ever before possessed. When the scholars laid them line by line against the text already in our hands, they matched. For a thousand years, in the dark, sealed in clay, God had been keeping His word — because it was never really resting in that cave at all. It was standing firm in the heavens. And consider one thing more: of the New Testament alone there survive more than five thousand handwritten Greek manuscripts, vastly more than for any other writing from the ancient world. The Book you hold did not come down to us by a thread. It came down to us by a flood, because the One who breathed it out was determined that you would have it in your hands today.
So that is the first thing to know about the Book you are holding. It endures. It has outlasted the men who burned it and the empires that banned it, and it will outlast every worry you are carrying right now.
It Comforts
There is something about those two men on the road that we have not yet named. We have spoken of their grief, and of the fire that was quietly being lit in them as the stranger opened the Scriptures. But there is a stage between the two — between the grief and the fire — that is easy to miss. Before anything could ignite in them, something had to thaw. A cold thing cannot catch fire. And the Scriptures did that first: before the fire, the warmth; before the igniting, the comforting.
This Book, the Book that has outlasted every attempt to destroy it, is at its deepest level a book of comfort — and in that comforting work it is unlike anything else in the world, because it has been meeting broken people on their worst roads since the day it was given, and has never once arrived too late.
The apostle Paul steps back from the whole sweep of the Old Testament and tells us plainly what all of it was for:
For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope. — Romans 15:4
Everything. Paul does not say the comforting parts were written for our comfort and the difficult parts for our instruction. He says everything written in the past was written for one end: that we might have hope. And look at the road he says it travels to get there. Not a short road. Not a smooth one. Through the Scriptures we are taught endurance — the staying-power of a soul still standing when the storm has done its worst — and through that endurance comes, at last, the encouragement, and at last the hope.
There is a reason the Book of Job is there, with all its unanswered cries. There is a reason Lamentations is there — Jeremiah sitting in the rubble of the city he loved, weeping out words that have since comforted two thousand years of rubble-sitters. There is a reason the psalms are full of crying before they are full of singing, full of “How long, O LORD?” before they are full of “Praise the LORD.” Not because God is comfortable with our suffering, but because He is determined to walk into it with us — and this Book is the record of His doing exactly that. All of it was written for you. Not to tidy up your theology, but to put a staff in your hand for the road you are on.
One man’s testimony puts it past all doubt — a man who found it true not in comfort but under siege:
My comfort in my suffering is this: Your promise preserves my life. — Psalm 119:50
This psalmist is not writing from safety: he is being hunted and mocked for his faith, and a few lines later he mentions the arrogant who persecute him without cause. In the grinding middle of all of that — not after it, not looking back on it from the far shore — one thing is keeping him alive. Not his own courage, which had failed before and would fail again. Not the solidarity of friends. Your promise preserves my life. There is a particular mercy in the fact that God saw fit to put that sentence into His Book, because it means there is at least one man — a real man, frightened and under siege, with the same breaking-point as the rest of us — who walked through the worst and came out the other side with this one report: the word held. Here is the quiet gift of it: you are not the first person to stand where you are standing. Someone has been here. Someone made it through on exactly what is in your hands right now. The word that preserved his life is the same word open in front of you.
And there is the verse that three thousand years of suffering men and women have worn smooth with their hands:
Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. — Psalm 23:4
Let us bring that to the Emmaus road. Two men walking through the darkest valley they had ever entered — not a metaphor but a literal evening on a literal road, carrying a literal grief that felt permanent. And the comfort of the rod and the staff came to them not in a vision, not in a voice from the sky, but in the form of an open Book, explained to them mile after mile by the very Shepherd the psalm had always been about. They could not see Him. They did not yet know it was Him. But the rod and the staff were there, and the comfort was real, and they felt it — a slow, quiet thawing — though the fire would not break out until much later that night. That is how this comfort tends to work. It does not announce itself. It does not demand that you feel better at once. It simply comes alongside you on the road, at your pace, and begins — before you even recognize what is happening — to carry part of the weight.
So if you came to this book carrying something that has bent you double — a diagnosis that has changed everything, a loss that has left the house quiet in all the wrong ways, a fear that followed you to bed and was still there when you woke — hear what the psalmist discovered and what those two on the road found before they ever knew a fire was coming: the rod and the staff are here. They have held people in darker places than this. They will hold you. Your promise preserves my life. And so it does — and so it will.
It Ignites
We come now to the strangest of the three, and the most important — because this is the one those two men on the Emmaus road actually felt in their bodies. The first two things we could demonstrate to a skeptic with a history book and an open mind. This last one you can only ever come to know by experience.
Consider the difference between this Book and every other book on your shelf at home. The others were written to fill your head. This one was given to set your heart on fire. When those two travelers finally found words for what had happened to them on the road, notice carefully what they did not say. They did not say, “Were not our minds expanded while he reasoned with us?” They did not say their questions had all been answered or their theology tidied up — though both of those things had certainly happened on that walk. They said their hearts had burned. This Book does not merely inform a man. It ignites him. And this is no accident of language: fire is the very word God keeps reaching for when He describes His own word.
God chooses that word Himself, and sets it hard against the empty words of the false prophets:
“Is not my word like fire,” declares the LORD, “and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?” — Jeremiah 23:29
Catch the setting, because it sharpens the point considerably. God is speaking here against the false prophets of Jeremiah’s day — the smooth, comfortable men who told the people pleasant dreams and reassuring nonsense and then stamped the label “the word of the LORD” on it. And God draws a sharp line between their words and His own. Their words, He says just a few verses earlier, are like chaff — dry, weightless, empty husks, blown clean away on the first gust of wind. But my word, He says, is fire. My word is a hammer that shatters rock.
Hear the two pictures. Fire, to warm what is cold and to burn away what is dead and to give light in the dark. And a hammer, to break what has grown far too hard to be moved by anything else. There are hearts that have gone hard as stone over the years — hard with old disappointments, hard with sin, hard with the weight of cold religious habit. And there is only one thing in all the world that breaks granite like that. Not good advice. Not nagging. Not your own best efforts and resolutions, which shatter against the rock and leave it untouched. The hammer of the word of God.
And watch what that fire does inside a man who has felt it. The prophet Jeremiah has had a dreadful day. A priest named Pashhur, who did not appreciate his preaching, has had him beaten and locked in the stocks overnight — held fast, publicly, where everyone passing by could see him and jeer. And when they finally let him out, the prophet has had more than enough. So he makes what looks like a very reasonable decision. He resolves to quit. I am finished, he tells himself. I will keep my head down and my mouth shut and save my own skin. And then he tells us what actually happened when he tried it:
But if I say, “I will not mention his word or speak anymore in his name,” his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot. — Jeremiah 20:9
He simply could not do it. The word that he had taken down inside himself would not let him stay silent. It burned. He tried to bottle it up, to contain it in his bones where no one could see it, and instead of going quiet it scorched him from the inside, until holding it in cost him far more than letting it out ever had. That is what this Book does to a man or a woman who truly takes it in. It does not sit there quietly as information. It is a fire shut up in the bones.
And so we come home to where we began:
“Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?” — Luke 24:32
This is where we began, and now you can see it for what it was. Two ordinary, heartbroken men, walking home in the failing evening light, dragging their grief along the road behind them — and the Scriptures are opened to them, and a fire is lit in them that they cannot account for and cannot put out. Not their minds first. Their hearts. The very same fire that Jeremiah carried smoldering in his bones; the very same fire that God said His word always is; kindled now in two disappointed disciples who only wanted to get home and grieve in peace. An open Bible, in the hands of Christ, did that to them.
So let me ask you something, and let me ask it gently, because it is a deeply personal question. Has your own time in this Book gone cold lately? Is it all duty now and no delight — a chapter read because you know full well you ought to read it, closed again with nothing catching alight? If that is you — and it is more of us than would care to admit it — then hear this carefully. The problem is not the Book. A fire that has burned low through the night has not changed its nature; the embers have not stopped being fire. They need two things, and only two: fuel and nearness. The log that sits across the room stays cold; the log laid on the coals catches. So bring it close again. Open the thing. Sit down with it and stay longer than feels comfortable. Stop merely reading at it from a distance and start asking the risen Christ Himself to walk you through it, the way He walked those two men through it on the road that evening. Draw near to the fire — and then come back and tell me whether your heart stayed cold.
✠ ✠ ✠
So there is the Book in your hands, and there are the three things I asked you, right at the start, to carry with you.
It endures — and so it will outlast every fear and every loss and every worry you are carrying, still standing, open, unburnt, long after the grass has withered and the flowers have fallen and the world itself has passed quietly away.
It comforts — it has been meeting broken people on their worst roads since the day it was given, and has never once arrived too late.
And it ignites — with power enough to break a heart of solid rock, and warmth enough to thaw a heart that had long ago given up on ever being warm again.
When the Scriptures were opened to those two men on the Emmaus road, they did not stay sitting where they were. Something happened to their feet that night that we have not even spoken about yet — but that part of the story, the turning around and the running all the way back to Jerusalem in the dark, belongs to the chapters that are coming, and we will get there together. For now the question is smaller and simpler, and it is the only one that needs answering tonight. Will you open it? Not study it, not master it — only open it, and let the One who set two hearts ablaze on that road come near enough to do it again.
Were not our hearts burning within us? Friends — they can be again.
