The Bible doesn’t just inform you. It reads you, changes you, and moves you—and the proof is always in your feet.
Burning Hearts Series
They got up and returned at once to Jerusalem. — Luke 24:33
We have come a long way on this road together. At the start we set out with two heartbroken travelers, and we have followed them ever since, watching one part of them at a time. We have watched their hearts, their ears, their eyes, their hands. Now we watch their feet.
And here is what their feet do. The moment their eyes are opened and they know who has been with them, the Lord vanishes — and they got up and returned at once to Jerusalem (Luke 24:33). They got up. At once. That very hour, with the supper barely touched and the night already fallen. Now think hard about what that meant. Emmaus lay seven miles from Jerusalem. They had walked those seven miles out in the afternoon — slowly, heavily, grieving, going the wrong way. And now they turn straight around and walk all seven of them back, in the dark, at night, on a road that was anything but safe after sundown. And I do not think they walked. I think they ran. The men who had crept out of the city in defeat went charging back into it in the dark, because something had happened to them that simply could not keep its seat.
That is the test of whether the Word has really done its work in a soul. Not a warm feeling, though the feeling may be real. Not a head full of new understanding, though the understanding may be sound. The test is feet that move. A changed direction. You can tell a great deal about a person’s faith not by what stirs in them while the Book lies open, but by what they do once they close it and stand up.
Because we have come, brothers and sisters, to the most dangerous possibility in this entire book. It is possible to have all the rest and stop short of this. It is possible to have a heart that has been warmed, ears that have heard, eyes that have been opened, and hands that have shared the bread — and still keep your seat. It is possible to know this Book inside and out — to win the quiz, to settle the argument, to quote the chapter and the verse — and to be, at the end of it all, utterly unchanged by it. The devil himself knows his Bible. There is no more frightening person in any church than the one who has heard everything and done nothing, because that person has every reason to think himself safe, and is in the gravest danger of all.
So I want to show you three things the Word does to a man or woman who truly takes it in. It reads you. It changes you. And it moves you. And I want one man to walk the whole of this chapter beside us. His name is Nicodemus — the teacher of Israel we glimpsed a few chapters back, standing in the lamplight with the light blazing on the page and a veil drawn across his eyes. We left him there, promising we would meet him again. This is where we keep that promise, and follow him all the way to the end.
It Reads You
Start with the great reversal, because until you have felt it you have not really met this Book at all. You sit down to read the Word — and you discover, if you sit there long enough and honestly enough, that the Word is reading you. You came to examine it; it examines you. You came with your questions for the text; the text has questions for you. The Book that you hold open in your two hands holds you open before God.
Hebrews puts it as sharply as it can be put:
For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. — Hebrews 4:12
Alive and active. Not a dead record of what God once said, but a living blade in the hand of the God who is still saying it. And what does the blade do? It cuts inward. A surgeon’s scalpel goes where your own fingers cannot, down past the skin to the thing underneath that is actually wrong. We have machines now that can look straight through a man — you walk in feeling perfectly well, and the scan shows the shadow you never knew was there.
That is the word of God in a human life. It does not stay on the surface, fussing about your outward behavior. It goes down into the place you keep hidden even from yourself — to the thoughts and attitudes of the heart — and there it does its work. We can do a good and religious thing — give, serve, pray, even preach — for a tangle of reasons, some of them pure and some of them not, knotted so tightly together that we cannot tell them apart ourselves. The Word can. It slides in between soul and spirit, between joint and marrow, between the part of the act that was truly for God and the part that was quietly for us, and it divides them clean. You think you are the one doing the reading. All the while the blade is moving, and it is moving in you.
And it presses the point past all escape:
Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account. — Hebrews 4:13
There is no hiding from this Book, because there is no hiding from the God whose Book it is. Uncovered and laid bare — the words mean stripped, exposed, with nothing pulled over it. We are all of us experts at managing what others see. We have a face for church, and a face for home, and a face for when we are quite alone, and we keep them in separate drawers. But the word of God will not deal with the managed version of you. It lays you bare. And we fear that exposure the way a man with a lump fears the doctor — putting it off, telling ourselves that not looking will somehow make it not be there. So grasp this: that exposure is not cruelty. It is mercy. A wound that is hidden festers; a wound that is uncovered can be healed. The Word strips us not to shame us but to save us, for God cannot heal the sin you will not let Him see.
Which is why the only sane response is David’s:
Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. — Psalm 139:23–24
Do you hear how bold that is? Most of us read the Bible with our guard up, quietly steering it away from the rooms we would rather it left alone. David does the opposite. He flings every door in the house open and says: search me. Come in. Test me. Go into the anxious thoughts, and the offensive ways, and the things I have not even admitted to myself, and turn on the lights. That is a man who has stopped using the Bible as a mirror to admire himself in, and started letting it read him.
And here is where Nicodemus joins us. He comes to Jesus by night — a ruler of the Jews, a member of the great council, a teacher of teachers, a man who had spent his whole life inside these very Scriptures. And he comes with his compliments and his careful questions, ready, no doubt, for a learned discussion between two experts. Jesus will not have the discussion. He reaches straight past all of it and reads the man: “You are Israel’s teacher,” He says, “and do you not understand these things?” (John 3:10). All that learning — the law at his fingertips, the prophets by heart, a lifetime of study behind those cautious nighttime questions — and the one thing needful had passed him clean by. He had mastered the Book and never once let the Book master him. The great reader of the Book sat there in the lamplight and was read by it, and found wanting. So may we all be — and thank God for it.
It Changes You
But the Word does not lay you bare and leave you lying there. That is where it would be cruel, if it stopped at the exposing. It does not stop. The same Word that cuts also heals; the same blade that opens you up sews you back together new. It does not merely inform you. It transforms you. It gets inside and it changes the man.
The psalmist heaps up what it does:
The law of the LORD is perfect, refreshing the soul. The statutes of the LORD are trustworthy, making wise the simple. The precepts of the LORD are right, giving joy to the heart. The commands of the LORD are radiant, giving light to the eyes. — Psalm 19:7–8
Look at all those verbs of change — refreshing, making wise, giving joy, giving light. This is not a Book that leaves you where it found you. Take them one at a time. It revives a soul gone flat and weary, the way cold water revives a man who never knew how thirsty he had become. It makes the simple wise — not clever, not learned, but wise, which is a rarer and far better thing, and which the schools cannot give you at any price. It gives joy to a heavy heart, a settled gladness that does not wait for the circumstances to behave themselves. And it gives light to the eyes, so that things you used to stumble over in the dark you can suddenly see. And it does all of this not in a single flash but over years, working on you the way the sea works on a stone — patiently, ceaselessly — until the shape of your soul is not what it was. The danger is to handle the Word for information only, to read it the way you read the news, taking in facts and setting it down unchanged. But that is to hold the medicine, and read the label, and study the dosage, and never once swallow it. Medicine read is no medicine at all. It is only the medicine taken that heals.
Jeremiah shows what it looks like to take it in:
When your words came, I ate them; they were my joy and my heart’s delight, for I bear your name, LORD God Almighty. — Jeremiah 15:16
He ate them. There is the whole difference between the hearer and the doer in a single picture. You do not frame your dinner and hang it on the wall to admire; you eat it, and it becomes part of you, built into your very bones. Jeremiah did not merely read God’s words, or quote them, or even preach them. He took them in, and they became him — his joy, his delight, the substance of the man. There are believers like that, and you have met them, and you have never forgotten them. The Word has so soaked into them over the long years that it comes out of them now without effort, the way water wrung from a sponge tastes of whatever it was steeped in — it shows in how they speak, and more in how they suffer, and most of all in how they treat the person no one is watching them treat. You cannot get that from a single reading, or even from a thousand readings held at arm’s length. You get it one way only. They did not merely learn the Word. They ate it, year upon year, until it became the very substance of the soul.
And Jesus names the great change it works:
“If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” — John 8:31–32
Notice the order, for the order is everything. Not if you hear my teaching. Not even if you understand my teaching. If you hold to it — if you take it up and stay in it and live in it and keep on living in it — then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. The freedom lies on the far side of the holding-on. And what a freedom it is. There are people who have lived for years inside a lie — that they are beyond forgiveness, that they must somehow earn their way, that they are only as loved as they are useful, that the chains they were born in can never come off — and the truth of God’s Word, taken in and held onto, walks straight into that prison and opens the door. I have watched it happen. A man who had carried the weight of one old sin for thirty years, certain it had put him forever past the reach of grace, hears the plain Word of God that the blood of Christ cleanses from all sin — really hears it, and holds onto it — and you can all but see the weight slide off his back as he stands there.
The Word does not just correct your information. It breaks your chains. Nicodemus needed exactly that. Jesus told him plainly that it is not enough to know: “you must be born again” (John 3:7). All your Scripture, Nicodemus, and you must still be made new from the inside. And somewhere — we are not told the night, nor the hour — that new birth came. The teacher who had only ever known about God came, at the last, to be changed by Him.
It Moves You
So it reads you, and it changes you. But here is the proof of the whole thing, the place where all the talk is finally put to the test, the thing this whole chapter has been walking toward.
The Word that has truly read you and truly changed you will move you. It will get down into your feet. There is a kind of religion that lives entirely above the neck — all thinking and talking and agreeing — and never travels the eighteen inches down to the heart, and never travels the longer road from the heart out to the hands and the feet. But the Word of God was never meant to stop above the neck. A faith that never reaches the feet is a faith that stopped somewhere short of the heart it claimed to have reached. Show me where a person’s feet actually go, what they actually do, the direction they are actually pointed, and I will show you what that person actually believes, whatever his mouth may say.
James, a leader of the early church in Jerusalem, gives the great warning of the whole book:
Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. — James 1:22–24
There is the most haunting picture in the New Testament for what too many of us do with this Book. The Word, James says, is a mirror. You look into it and you see yourself — really see yourself, the smudge on the cheek, the very thing that needs putting right. And then the hearer-only does the strangest thing of all: he walks away, and by the time he has reached the door he has forgotten his own face. He saw exactly what was wrong, and did nothing, and forgot.
We do it every single week. We hear the Word that names the precise thing in us that needs to change; we nod; we may even be moved by it; and then we file out and forget our own face before the cars are out of the parking lot. And mark the exact word James uses: do not deceive yourselves. That is the peril. The hearer-only is not merely a man who has failed to act. He is a man who has talked himself into believing that the hearing was the doing — that to be moved by the sermon is to have obeyed it, that to feel the truth is the same as to live it. It is the most comfortable self-deception in all of religion, and it fills our pews. To hear and not do is no small failing. It is a way of fooling yourself into thinking that something happened when nothing did. The man who has read every book on running and never once laced up a shoe is not a runner; he is a reader who is out of breath on the stairs.
But James does not end on the warning:
But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it—not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it—they will be blessed in what they do. — James 1:25
There is the doer. He looks intently — he does not glance and leave; he bends close and keeps on looking. He continues in it. And then comes the word the hearer-only never reaches: doing it. And to that one, and that one alone, comes the blessing — blessed in what they do. Not blessed in what he knows. Not blessed in what he feels. Blessed in what he does. The blessing of God runs down the channel of obedience, and the man who will not obey has dammed up the very stream he keeps praying would flow.
And here, at last, are the feet of our two travelers:
They got up and returned at once to Jerusalem. — Luke 24:33
This is what a heard, understood, opened, transforming Word does in the end. It does not leave you at the table. It puts you on the road. These two had been walking the wrong way — away from the others, away from Jerusalem, away from the place where God was at work. And the opened Word spun them clean around, the way a man driving the wrong direction at last sees it and pulls a hard turn in the road, so that now every mile carries him home instead of farther away.
That is what repentance is, at the bottom of it — not first a feeling, but a turning of the feet; a body pointed one way that gets pointed the other. And it cost them something to turn. It was dark by now. It was a full seven miles. The road between Emmaus and Jerusalem was no place to be after nightfall, and any sensible man would have barred the door and set out fresh in the morning, when it was light and safe and the news would surely keep. They did not wait for the morning. They could not. The Word in them would not let them sit; it had its hand on their backs and pushed them out into the night. There is an urgency the truly opened Word puts into a person that you cannot manufacture and cannot fake, and its surest sign is feet that will not wait for a more convenient season.
Now watch Nicodemus do the very same thing, in slow motion, across a whole Gospel. He comes to Jesus first by night — careful, hidden, his reputation tucked safely under his arm. Later, in the seventh chapter, we find him beginning to speak up for Jesus before the hostile council — still cautious, but no longer silent (see John 7:50–52). And then, at the very end, when the brave disciples have all fled and the Lord hangs dead, and to be linked with Him now is to risk everything a man has — there is Nicodemus, in broad daylight, carrying seventy-five pounds of costly spices to bury the crucified Christ with his own two hands (see John 19:38–42). The man who once came by night now comes in the open. His feet have turned all the way around. The Word that read him, and changed him, has finally moved him — out into the light, at the very moment it cost the most.
And now hear how the whole Bible pictures what that Word can do, in the most extreme case imaginable. The prophet Ezekiel is set down in a valley full of bones. Not freshly fallen soldiers, but bones — scattered, dry, sun-bleached, a whole army dead so long there was no flesh left, no hope left, nothing but a desert of the dead. And God asks him, “Son of man, can these bones live?” (Ezekiel 37:3).
Now if you or I had been standing in that valley, we would have known the sensible answer to that question. Can these bones live? Of course not. They are bones. The thing is over; it was over a long time ago. But God tells Ezekiel to do the one thing that could not possibly help — to preach. To open his mouth and speak the word of the LORD over a field of scattered corpses, as though dry bones had ears: “Dry bones, hear the word of the LORD!” (Ezekiel 37:4). And Ezekiel, God help him, does it — he stands in that valley of the hopelessly dead and he preaches the word.
And then it begins. A noise. A rattling, far off and then near, all across the valley floor; bone finding its bone in the dust, and joining; sinew, and then flesh, coming up over them; and last of all the breath of God breathing into them — and then this: they came to life and stood up on their feet, a vast army (Ezekiel 37:10). Stood up. On their feet.
That is the last word on what the Word of God does to the dead. It does not merely inform the bones. It does not merely comfort the bones. It raises the bones, and stands them on their feet, and turns a graveyard into an army on the march. And mark this — they do not simply sit up and look around. They get up, on their feet, and they are an army, and an army is made to move, to go, to march out and do the will of the One who raised it. There is the Word of God, finished with its work in a person: not a tidied-up corpse, but a soldier on his feet.
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So let it get all the way down into your feet before you turn the page.
The Word reads you — it is alive and active, sharper than any sword, and it lays you bare; and the wise thing, the saving thing, is not to hide from it but to fling the doors wide and pray, search me, God.
The Word changes you — it refreshes the soul, and makes the simple wise, and breaks the chains of every lie; but only as it is eaten, and held onto, and not merely read, for the medicine left in the bottle heals no one.
And the Word moves you — it will not leave you in your seat; it turns the feet around and sends them down the road; and the blessing of God falls not on the one who knows it but on the one who does it.
Nicodemus heard, and was read, and was changed, and at the last his feet carried him out into the daylight to do the most dangerous and most beautiful thing of his life. The two on the Emmaus road heard, and saw, and were changed at the table, and could not keep their seats — they were up and out and running back through the dark before the night was old.
So let me leave you with the question of the valley of bones. Somewhere in your life there is a valley — a dry place, a dead place, a thing you long ago gave up for hopeless, scattered and bleached and beyond all reviving. It may be a marriage. It may be a habit that has beaten you for twenty years. It may be a faith that has gone to bone and dust, so that you have quietly stopped expecting anything from God at all. And the only thing standing between that valley and a living army up on its feet is the word of the LORD, spoken over it. What valley in your life is waiting for you to open this Book?
They got up, and returned at once. And when they reached Jerusalem, they opened their mouths and told what they had seen. But that — what the Word does to a man’s lips, once it has finished its work in his feet — is where we go, at the very last, in the final chapter.
For now: do not merely hear it. Get up. And go.
