Take Up and Read
2 Corinthians 3:18 "And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit."
Summer, 386 AD. A walled garden behind a house in Milan. A brilliant, restless, 31 year-old professor of rhetoric named Aurelius Augustinus was weeping under a fig tree. He had the most prestigious academic chair in the Latin West. He had spent years chasing sensual pleasures and intellectual systems that never satisfied him. He had watched his mother, Monica, pray for his soul for three decades. And that afternoon, his whole inner life finally came apart.
Then, over the garden wall, he heard a child's voice from a neighboring house, singsonging in Latin: tolle lege, tolle lege. Take up and read, take up and read. Augustine dismissed it at first. Children played games all the time. But the phrase kept repeating, and he couldn’t shake the conviction that God was speaking to him through it. He ran back to where his friend had left a copy of Paul's letters, picked up the scroll, and read the first verse his eyes landed on.
"Not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires" (Romans 13:13-14).
He later wrote, of that moment: a light of certainty flooded my heart, and all the darkness of doubt vanished away. He didn’t need to read further. One of the greatest theologians of the Western church was handed his new life by two sentences of Paul he stumbled into in a garden.
And this is the scene we’ve been walking toward all week, and really all three weeks of this series.
Week 1 said the Bible is the Word God breathed out. Week 2 said the Bible is the Word we live under. Week 3 has said the Bible is the Word that changes us. And what we see in Augustine is all three of those truths meeting in a single afternoon. The Word that the Spirit carried onto the page in the 50s AD reached out over three centuries to a weeping rhetorician in a Milanese garden and lifted him to his feet as a new man. Tolle lege. Take up and read.
Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 3:18 that "we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another." Read that slowly. The transformation doesn’t happen after we read the Bible. The transformation happens as we read it. The act of beholding the Christ the Word is about is the engine of Christian change.
We’ve been taught to measure our Bible reading by how much we understood, how much we can remember, how effectively we can apply it. Paul says the measure is different. Did we behold Him? Because the longer we look, the more we become like what we are looking at. The Christian who reads Scripture with the eyes of his heart fixed on Christ is being slowly, quietly, irreversibly remade in that Christ's likeness.
This is the wonder of the whole series arc. The Book God breathed out, that we live under, that we are changed by, has only one true subject: a Son who walked out of a tomb three days after men killed Him. Every page points to Him. Every command is an invitation to be more like Him. Every promise is a beam of light from His face. And when we take up and read, we aren’t extracting information from an ancient document. We’re sitting with a risen Lord who has been waiting to speak with us all week.
This morning, we gather for worship. We come not as people meeting the Word for the first time but as people who have been reading it with Him all week. The songs will sound different to those who have been in the Book. The sermon will land deeper. The Table will taste sweeter. This is a people who live, love, and give like Jesus because we’ve been beholding the face of Jesus on every page we’ve opened.
Today: Arrive to corporate worship as someone who has been listening all week. Sing like a person who has heard from God. Receive the Word preached like a person who has been under it already. And when you walk out those doors into Monday, carry the Book with you. The same Word that gathers us is the same Word that sends us. Take up and read.
Prayer: "Father, I worship You for the wonder of a Word that meets me where I sit and changes me as I look. Thank You for a Christ whose face shines out of every page. Gather us today as a people who have been beholding You all week, and send us out with our gaze fixed on Christ. In Jesus' name, Amen."
-PK