Receive It Before You Repeat It

All my words that I shall speak unto thee receive in thine heart, and hear with thine ears.

Ezekiel 3:10

Read Ezekiel 2 and 3. Focus on Ezekiel 2:8 through 3:11 and 3:15. You hear a useful thought and immediately think of someone who needs it. A friend should hear that. Your spouse ought to read this. A coworker would benefit from the lesson. Before the words have reached your own habits, you are preparing to pass them along. Ezekiel is given a message for a resistant people, but first he must receive it himself. In the vision, he eats a scroll covered with lament, mourning, and woe. It tastes sweet in his mouth even though the message it contains is painful. Eating the scroll is a prophetic image of taking God's word inward. Ezekiel is not commissioned merely to carry information that leaves him personally untouched. God explicitly tells him to receive the words in his heart and hear them with his ears before speaking to the exiles. The message's sweetness does not make its contents cheerful. God's word is good and worthy to be received even when it exposes what is wrong. A pleasant feeling is not the only evidence that we have encountered something spiritually nourishing. Later, Ezekiel sits among the exiles for seven days, overwhelmed. The text does not give us permission to explain every part of his inward experience, but it shows that his ministry does not begin with breezy distance from the people. He is among them before he speaks further. This sequence challenges the speed with which we can turn learning into advice. We may know the wording of a principle without having allowed it to question us. Our delivery becomes more confident than our own practice. Consider a passage about patience. Before sending it to the person who annoys you, notice how you respond when you are interrupted. Before sharing a teaching on honesty, examine the explanation you offered for a missed commitment. A truth becomes more responsibly spoken when we have stood beneath it ourselves. This does not mean waiting until we practice everything perfectly before encouraging anyone. It means receiving instruction as a participant, with humility about the work still needed in us. There is a different tone in the sentence, “This has been challenging me too.” It can open a conversation that a superior lecture would close. Let today's reading enter your own life before assigning it a destination in somebody else's. The first person available to receive it is you. Put It into Practice Take one passage you want to share and apply it to a specific choice of your own first. If you share it later, do so without pretending you have outgrown its instruction.

Which lesson have you been eager to give someone else without considering its claim on you?

God who speaks, make me receptive before I become instructive. Keep useful knowledge from becoming a way to stand above people. Let Your Word correct my own habits and give my encouragement the humility of shared need. Amen.