They couldn’t even wait their turn to speak. A Word that truly changes you always finds its way to your lips.
Burning Hearts Series
You are witnesses of these things. — Luke 24:48
Here we are at the last stretch of the road. At the start we set out after two heartbroken strangers walking away from Jerusalem, and we have followed them every step since, watching one part of them at a time. We watched their hearts catch fire. We watched their ears hear the living voice of God. We watched their eyes come open and recognize the risen Christ at the table. We watched their hands break bread with Him. And in the last chapter we watched their feet — up and out of their chairs, turned clean around, running the seven dark miles back to Jerusalem.
Now we come to the last thing about them. We watch their lips.
Because look what happens the moment they arrive. They burst back into that upper room, breathless from the road, and they find the others already buzzing with it — the disciples are saying to one another, “It is true! The Lord has risen and has appeared to Simon” (Luke 24:34). The whole place is alive with the news. And the two from Emmaus cannot even wait their turn; they told what had happened on the way, and how Jesus was recognized by them when he broke the bread (Luke 24:35). They told. The very first thing those opened, transformed, turned-around disciples do, the instant they are through the door, is open their mouths and tell what they have seen.
And do you notice how far they have traveled — not in miles, but in their souls? This book began with some of the saddest words in all the Bible: we had hoped. It ends with some of the gladest: the Lord has risen. It began with two men muttering their grief to each other on an empty road in the failing light. It ends with a roomful of people who cannot stop telling the news to anyone who will listen. That is the whole journey of the Word in a human life, and it is the journey we have been making together through these six chapters. From a buried hope to a told story. From a whisper of despair to a shout of joy.
So here is the danger, and here is the glory, of this final chapter. The Word that warms your heart, and fills your ears, and opens your eyes, and feeds you at the table, and turns your feet around — that Word has one more step still to take. And if it does not take that step, it has stopped just short of everything it was sent to do. It must reach your lips. A faith that has gone silent is a faith that has been somehow interrupted on the way to its purpose, like a river that sinks into the sand a mile from the sea. The Word was given to you to be given away.
There is no such thing, in the long run, as a purely private Christian — a believer who only ever receives, and receives, and never once passes anything on. Water that flows in and never flows out turns stagnant; the pond with no outlet goes green and still and lifeless, while the stream that is forever giving its water away stays clear and cold and alive. A faith with no outlet goes the way of the pond. What we refuse to pass on, we slowly lose the very life of.
So, three things. The Word that has truly done its work cannot stay in. You — yes, you — are sent out with it. And when you tell it, it will not come back to you empty.
Beside us this time walks a woman at a well in Samaria — not a scholar, not a ruler of the Jews studying by lamplight, but a woman with a past she was ashamed of, and a reputation in ruins, and no qualifications of any kind — who became one of the great missionaries of the New Testament with a single, stumbling sentence.
It Cannot Stay In
Start here, because this is where it begins, long before anyone tells you that you ought to share your faith. When the Word has truly done its work in a soul, it cannot be kept inside. It is not first a matter of duty. It is a matter of pressure. Something has happened that is too big, and too good, and too true to hold, and it presses against the walls to get out.
It shows first in our own two travelers, the moment they are through the door:
They got up and returned at once to Jerusalem. There they found the Eleven and those with them, assembled together and saying, “It is true! The Lord has risen and has appeared to Simon.” Then the two told what had happened on the way, and how Jesus was recognized by them when he broke the bread. — Luke 24:33–35
Look closely at what it was they told. It was not a lecture on the doctrine of the resurrection. It was not three neat points and a closing poem. They told what had happened on the way — their own story, the thing they themselves had just lived through on that road, in their own plain and breathless words. And that is testimony, and it is the most natural thing in all the world once the Word has truly gripped a person. You are not asked to explain everything. You are not asked to have an answer for every hard question a clever man could throw at you. You are asked to tell what happened to you. And notice they could not even find a polite gap in the conversation to wait for. The room was already loud with the good news; the others were already telling; and the two from Emmaus simply piled their own story straight on top of everyone else’s, because the thing inside them had to come out and could not wait its turn. That is the surest mark of the Word that has landed in a heart. It does not have to be squeezed out of a person with guilt and pressure. It overflows of its own accord.
A psalmist gives the telling its simplest shape:
Come and hear, all you who fear God; let me tell you what he has done for me. — Psalm 66:16
Not let me prove to you that God exists. Not let me win this argument. Just — let me tell you what he has done for me. And every believer has a for me. Every one of you has something God has actually done in your own life, in your own story, that you of all people on earth know beyond doubt to be true, because you were there when He did it.
And here our woman from Samaria steps in. She had come out to the well in the full heat of the noonday, alone — likely at an hour she could avoid the other women, because her life was a wreck and the whole town knew the sorry details of it. And at that well she met a stranger who told her everything she had ever done — and who, instead of crushing her with it, knew the very worst of her and offered her living water anyway. And John tells us that leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town (John 4:28). She left her jar.
Think of that. She had walked all that way for water, and she forgot the very thing she had come for, and abandoned it there in the dust, and ran — because she had found something better than water. And what did she say when she got there? Not a sermon. Not a single point of theology. One sentence: “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?” (John 4:29). Let me tell you what He has done for me. It simply cannot stay in.
But what happens when the Word has done its work in you and the world does everything it can to push it back down? You will remember Jeremiah, who tried to make exactly that decision — to keep his head down, his mouth shut, and save his own skin — and found the word burning in his bones like a fire he could not contain, until holding it in cost him far more than letting it out ever had.
I know something of what Jeremiah felt. There came a point in my own life when, fed up and worn out, I made a decision that would have made perfect sense to anyone who knew the circumstances: I would become a hermit. I cut myself off from everyone — from ministry, from people, from the noise of it all — and for a time I managed it. The only people I met and spoke to, quite literally, were my wife and children. What I was not able to manage was keeping the Word inside. Six months into my life as a hermit, it began to press against the walls the way it always does, and I found myself writing a series of articles I called Lessons in the Wilderness, which became podcasts, which became online sessions, simply because I could not keep the Word in. I had not planned any of it. I had planned the opposite. But the fire shut up in the bones will not stay shut up, and Jeremiah could have told me that before I tried.
And that overflow holds firm even under threat. Peter and John, hauled before the ruling council and ordered, on pain of real punishment, to stop speaking about Jesus altogether, give this answer to those powerful, frowning men:
“As for us, we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.” — Acts 4:20
We cannot help it. Not we defy you, though they did. Not we have screwed up our courage and decided to be brave. Simply — we cannot help it. The thing we have seen and heard will not stay behind our teeth. And you know that pressure, even if only in small and ordinary things. When good news comes to you — an engagement, the safe arrival of a baby, a child who has come through a dangerous operation, a job at the end of long gray months of nothing — nobody has to command you to share it. Nobody has to organize a training course to teach you how. You cannot keep it in; you have the phone in your hand before you have even thought about it; you are telling the stranger in line. And yet — is it not strange? — about the very best news in all the universe, that the grave stands empty and sin can be washed clean away and the dead shall live, about that we somehow go quiet, and careful, and shy. The first Christians did not. The news was simply too big for them, and so it spilled out everywhere, and not all the threats of the council could frighten it back into silence.
And if we are honest with ourselves, the reason we so often stay silent is not that the news has become small to us, but that something else has grown large. The fear of what people will think. The dread of the awkward pause, and the conversation that goes cold. The worry of being thought odd, or pushy, or naive. We have let the weight of a raised eyebrow come to matter more to us than the worth of a soul. But where the Word has truly done its work, it burns that fear away by slow degrees, until a person finds, almost to their own astonishment, that they can no more keep quiet about Christ than a new grandparent can keep quiet about the baby.
You Are Sent
But it is more than overflow. If it were only overflow, then the shy and the cautious and the tongue-tied among us could quietly excuse themselves and leave all the talking to the bold and the gifted. And it is not only overflow. It is a commission. The risen Christ does not merely permit His people to speak; He sends them. And He sends you — not only the preacher in the pulpit, not only the naturally outgoing, not only the one with all the answers at his fingertips. You. We have a way of turning evangelism into a specialist trade, something we hire and train professionals to do on our behalf, the way we call a plumber for the pipes — and so the ordinary believer quietly folds his hands and feels himself excused. But there is no such arrangement anywhere in the New Testament. The good news went out across the whole ancient world not chiefly through famous apostles preaching to thousands, but through ten thousand nameless, ordinary Christians telling one neighbor over the fence, one fellow worker, one soldier in the next bunk, what had happened to them. It was not the professionals who carried the gospel to the ends of the earth. It was the witnesses.
This same Easter night, only a few lines on from our story, the risen Christ stands in the midst of them:
Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures. He told them, “This is what is written: The Messiah will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. I am going to send you what my Father has promised; but stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.” — Luke 24:45–49
Do you see how the whole of our journey pours itself out into those few sentences? He opens their minds to understand the Scriptures — there is the thread of Christ from the third chapter. He tells them the message must be preached to all nations — and that they are witnesses. And then, before He sends them anywhere, He tells them to wait. Wait for what? For the promise of the Father. For the power from on high. Because the witness He is commissioning is not something they can do in their own strength, on their own courage, by their own gifts. The Holy Spirit must come first. And this is not a small detail tucked away at the end of the commission — it is the whole point of it. Every word that has ever truly landed in a human heart, every testimony that has ever broken through the noise and done its quiet, lasting work in a soul, has done so not because the speaker was eloquent or bold or well-prepared, but because the Spirit of God was moving. Hold tightly to that, because it takes the crushing weight of the whole enterprise off your shoulders and puts it exactly where it belongs.
And then, once that power has come, watch what the sending looks like:
“You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” — Acts 1:8
Watch the circles widen, ring upon ring. It begins in Jerusalem — that is right where you already are; your own town, your own street, the people who already know your name and your faults. Then Judea — the wider region around. Then Samaria — and stop on that word, because Samaria was the place the respectable Jew crossed to the far side of the road to avoid; the wrong sort of people, the despised, the ones you did not speak to. And the good news is sent there, of all places, on purpose. And then, to the very ends of the earth — outward and outward until there is no living soul left out of earshot.
And do you know who reached Samaria first of all? Long before the book of Acts begins, a Samaritan woman went running into a Samaritan town to tell Samaritans about the Messiah (see John 4:1‑42). The apostles had been there too — they had walked those very streets, rubbed shoulders with those very people — and had come back with bread and said nothing. It took a woman with a ruined reputation and a single stammering sentence to do what twelve trained men had not thought to do. Samaria heard the good news from one of its own — and its least likely evangelist at that — before any of the Twelve had opened their mouths there. The Lord of the harvest had already stood beside that very well and looked out over those very fields and said to His startled disciples, “open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest” (John 4:35). And the fields are ripe still. And He is sending still.
And here is why the sending is so urgent, and why the silence of a single witness carries such weight:
Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can anyone preach unless they are sent? As it is written: How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news! — Romans 10:13–15
Follow that chain, link by link, from the beginning. Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved — that is the glory at the end of the road, the thing the whole chain exists to reach. But calling requires believing. Believing requires hearing. Hearing requires someone to speak. And speaking requires someone who has been sent.
So the whole great chain of another person’s eternity hangs, at the human end of it, on a sent someone opening their ordinary mouth. There may be a soul somewhere whose only road to heaven runs through your willingness to speak. We will likely never know, this side of glory, how much hung on the words we did or did not say. But trace your own story back for a moment. There was, almost certainly, a someone — a parent, a friend, a teacher, a neighbor, a person who simply stopped and bothered with you — a someone who told you, or who first put this Book into your hands. You are here at all because, somewhere back down the line, someone who was sent opened their mouth.
Now it is your turn to be that someone for another. And mark which part of the body Paul reaches for to crown with beauty — how beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news. In the last chapter it was the feet that turned and ran back through the dark. Now those very same feet carry the news out the door and down the street. The feet the Word turns around are the feet the Word then sends. There is nothing on the human body that the Bible calls beautiful quite so plainly as the feet of an ordinary person on their way to tell somebody about Jesus.
It Will Not Return Empty
Now we come to the very last word of the whole book, and it is the word that takes the fear out of everything else we have said. For I think I know what some of you are quietly thinking. I am no preacher. I will get the words all wrong. I will be asked something I cannot possibly answer. I have tried before, and nothing whatever came of it, and I am not sure I can bear to try again. So hear this, and let it set you free: the power was never in you to begin with. The power is in the Word. And the Word of God does not come back empty.
God gives the great promise Himself:
“As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish… so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.” — Isaiah 55:10–11
Sit with the picture a moment. Rain never falls for nothing. It does not come down out of the sky, touch the ground, and bounce straight back up unused and wasted. It always does something. It sinks in. It softens the hard clod. It swells the buried seed. It greens the brown hillside. You may not see a thing the day it falls — the real change is underground, hidden, out of sight, and it stays out of sight for a long, slow while — but the rain is never, ever wasted.
And God says: that, exactly that, is My Word. When it goes out, it goes to work. It does not come back to Me empty-handed and shrugging. It accomplishes the very thing I sent it to do. So when you drop a verse of Scripture into a hard conversation, or hand a struggling friend the plain story of what Christ has done for you, you are not flinging it out into a void and crossing your fingers. You are sending out a living thing that carries its own power inside it, and that cannot, by the sworn promise of God Himself, come back to you empty. You will not always see what it does. Remember, the rain does its first work underground, in the dark, where no one is watching. But it works.
And for the discouraged sower — and there are some — there is this:
Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy. Those who go out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with them. — Psalm 126:5–6
This verse is wonderfully honest about how hard the sowing can be. Sometimes you go out to sow with tears standing in your eyes. You speak to the friend who only shrugs and changes the subject. You pray and plead with the child who has wandered far away and will not come home. You drop the gentle word, again, to the husband who will not hear it, and you come back inside with nothing whatever to show for it and your heart like a stone.
The psalm does not pretend that never happens; it looks the weeping sower right in the eye. But it makes him a promise over his tears: those who go out weeping with the seed will come back singing with the sheaves. So keep sowing. The harvest is not on your timetable, and it is not in your hands, and that is a mercy, not a disappointment — but it is coming. One day the weeping sower will stand in a field gone gold to the horizon and not be able to stop laughing. No tear sown into the ground of a soul along with the good seed of God’s Word is ever, in the end, wasted.
Some seed comes up the very same season. Some lies hidden in the dark soil of a heart for thirty years before it ever breaks the surface — a word your mother once said, a verse a stranger left with you on a train, a quiet kindness from a believer whose name you have long since forgotten — and then, one ordinary day, perhaps long after the sower is in the grave, up it comes. You will not always be there to see the harvest of your own sowing, and that is all right. The Lord of the harvest keeps perfect accounts, and not one seed is ever lost in His field.
And here, once and for all, is whose work the harvest actually is — Paul writing about himself and Apollos, who had carried on the work Paul began in the church at Corinth:
I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. — 1 Corinthians 3:6–7
There is the weight lifted off your back for good and all. You are not asked to make anything grow. You could not do it if you strained at it with all your might; no farmer in the history of the world ever grew one single stalk of wheat by gritting his teeth and trying harder. Your part is only to plant, or to water — to say the word, to tell the story, to scatter the seed — and then to leave the growing, which you could never do anyway, to God, who alone can do it, and who delights to do it. It has been well said that all evangelism really is, in the end, one beggar telling another beggar where he found bread.
You do not have to be the baker. You do not have to understand the recipe, or explain how the wheat became the loaf. You are simply a starving person who stumbled upon the food, telling another starving person where to find it.
And here is our woman again, the proof of the whole thing. She was no scholar. She got her one sentence half sure — she put it as a nervous question, “Could this be the Messiah?”, not even sure of it herself. And yet John tells us that many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony (John 4:39). Her clumsy, uncertain, half-right, one-sentence word did not come back to her empty. It brought a whole town to the feet of Christ. And if God can do that through her, then hear me — He can do it through you.
✠ ✠ ✠
So we have come at last to the end of the road. Look back, now, down the whole length of it.
The Word came, and it set the heart burning — for it is a Book that endures, and comforts, and ignites. It reached the ears, and they heard at last, not a dead and dusty text, but the living voice of God Himself. It opened the eyes, until the veil fell away and Christ stood shining out of every page. It was broken like bread among them, and the hands knew Him at the table, and a lonely private faith became a shared and living one. It got all the way down into the feet, and turned them clean around, and would not let them keep their seats. And now, at the very last, it has reached the lips — and a story that began in grief on an empty road has become good news, told and told and told, to all the nations of the earth.
That is the journey the Word makes through one human life. And it does not stop with you. It was never meant to stop with you. Those two on the Emmaus road were not given the opened Scriptures so that they could sit on in a warm and private glow of blessing. They were given them so that they would leap up and run seven miles in the dark and burst into a crowded room and tell. The woman of Samaria was not given her living water so that she could keep it quietly to herself beside the well. She left her jar in the dirt and ran for the town.
Cast your minds all the way back, then, to where we began this whole journey, to the question that started everything: Were not our hearts burning within us? We have come a very long way from that first chapter. But understand this, as we close. A burning heart was never the destination. It was only ever the spark. And a fire, by its very nature, must spread, or else it goes out. The heart that the Word sets ablaze is a heart that the Word means, in the end, to send. The flame we spoke of in the first chapter was always, from the very beginning, meant to travel all the way to the lips in the last.
So the question I leave you with at the last is no longer the one we began with. It is the risen Christ’s own word — the last thing He said to those first trembling witnesses before He sent them out into all the world, and the thing He says now to every one of us who has walked this long road and felt our own hearts burn somewhere along the way:
“You are witnesses of these things.” — Luke 24:48
Now go — and tell what happened on the way.
