the well is open

a word before we begin

This is not a book against teachers. I had teachers; I have them still, though most of mine are in the grave and teach me yet from there. I owe them more than I could set down on a page, and before we are finished I mean to tell you about the chief of them. A good teacher is one of the kindest gifts the Lord gives to His church, and the man who sneers at all teaching has merely found a prouder way to be a fool. So make no mistake: this book will not take your teachers from you.

Nor is it a book that tells anyone to forsake the assembling of themselves together or to despise the preaching and teaching of the Word. That is its own error, and a real one, and there is no trading one ditch for the other here.

This book is about a single fact that most believers have never once stopped to consider: the well is open. The Word of God, in the common tongue and in its own tongues, with every tool to dig into it that kings and scholars of former ages would have wept to possess, lies open and free in the hands of the ordinary Christian, and the Spirit who authored it stands ready to teach it to him Himself. That is the fact. And the scandal of it, the thing that set me to writing, is how many of God’s own people are dying of thirst within arm’s reach of the water, waiting in a long and patient line for another man to bring them a cup.

So that is where we are going. Come and see. Rather yet, come and drink.

chapter one

the well is open

Nearly every believer alive has done a thing without once seeing that he did it. He stands in a long and patient line, waiting for a man to carry him a cup of water, and he stands there knee-deep in the river the entire time.

You’ve been standing in line for a cup of water while standing knee-deep in the river.

Understand the picture, for it is the whole of the matter. The Lord Jesus, weary by a well in Samaria, said a thing to a woman come to draw that ought to stop every believer who has ever owned a Bible and left it shut.

If thou knewest. There is the whole tragedy in two words. She did not know what stood before her. She thought of the deep well and the heavy bucket and the long walk in the heat, and the Fountain of living water Himself sat at her side, and she missed Him for thinking of the plumbing. So does the church. It thinks of the well and the bucket, the teacher, the program, the study, the man at the front who will fetch it down, and all the while the living water is held out directly, freely, by the One who is Himself the source.

Here is the fact, and most have spent a lifetime never once reckoning with it. The whole Word of God lies open in their hands. Not the summary of it. Not another man’s feelings about it. Not the thin gruel of a verse on a coffee mug. The thing itself, all sixty-six books, in the common tongue, and behind the common tongue the very Hebrew and Greek the Spirit moved holy men to write. And not the Word only, but the Author of the Word, the Holy Spirit Himself, given to indwell every believer and pledged to be his Teacher.

He shall teach you. Not He shall teach the seminary, which shall teach the pastor, who shall teach the author, who shall at the last teach the believer a watered-down, fourth-hand sip of what He said. He shall teach you. The believer has a resident Teacher, the very One who inspired the text, living within him and committed to opening that text to him. There has never been a tutor like Him in all the world, and He is given to the newest and humblest child of God as fully as to the greatest scholar who ever lived.

He shall teach you. Not the seminary, not the pastor, not the author: He shall teach you.

So why do so many of God’s people live on water carried to them in another man’s cup? They will sit through a study about the Bible. They will read a small and pleasant book of a man’s thoughts about the Bible. They will take in a teacher’s feelings about the Bible, and a podcast on the Bible, and a song drawn loosely from the Bible, and call the whole of it drinking. And the river itself runs clear and cold and open at their feet, and they will not bend to it.

This is no light failing, and it will not be treated as one. It is the strange tragedy of the modern church: a people perishing of thirst beside an open spring, persuaded that the water must be fetched for them, when it was never shut to them at all. The well is open. It has stood open longer than anyone now living has drawn breath, and the wonder is not that God opened it, for He has always meant His people to know Him. The wonder is how few have noticed, and walked down, and drunk.

That is what this book is for. To walk the reader down to the water. Come and see.

chapter two

how it used to be

To understand why so many believers stand in line for the cup instead of going to the river, one must understand a thing about how it used to be, for the habit made perfect sense once. The trouble is only that the world has changed underneath the habit, and the habit has not noticed.

For the better part of human history, the ordinary believer simply could not go to the Word himself. The reasons were not laziness or pride; they were iron, and there was no getting round them. He could not read; most people could not, through most of history. If by some mercy he could read, he did not own a Bible, for before the printing press a single copy was the labor of a man’s months and the price of a house. And if by some greater mercy he both could read and somehow held a copy, it was very likely in Latin, a tongue he had never been taught, kept in a language the common man could not follow even as it was read aloud to him.

So the Word came to such a believer the only way it could come, through a man. Through the one who could read, who had been taught the sacred tongues, who stood at the front and opened the scroll and told the people what it said. And thank God for that man. Without him the church through long dark centuries would have starved outright. The teacher was no luxury in those days, nor a crutch for the lazy. He was the pipe through which the only water reached the people at all.

Consider even the Scriptures themselves, and how they came to the first churches. When Paul wished to feed the believers at Corinth or Rome or Philippi, what did he do? He wrote them a letter, and sent it by the hand of a traveler, to be read aloud when the church gathered, for almost none of them owned so much as a page of their own. That is why we have the Epistles at all: the apostle could not be in every place, the people could not carry the text in their own hands, and a letter read aloud to the assembled congregation was the best the world of that hour allowed.

Here is a thought to hold, for it will matter greatly before we are done. Paul wrote letters because letters were the tool he had. Had the apostle possessed what the modern believer possesses, had every Christian in Corinth held the whole counsel of God in his own hand, in his own tongue, with the means to search it, does anyone imagine for one moment he would have begrudged them that? The apostle who longed for the Word to dwell in them richly would have rejoiced. The letter was the gift the age permitted; it was never meant to be a leash. The teaching of the few to the many was a mercy fitted to a time of scarcity; it was never the design God settled on for a people who would one day each hold the Book.

Keep that distinction close: the heavy dependence of the people upon their teachers, through most of the church’s history, was necessity. It was not the pattern God prized for its own sake. It was the shape the water took when the channel was narrow. And the question almost no one thinks to ask is what becomes of the habit of standing in line once the channel is no longer narrow at all.

chapter three

but now you have it

The channel is no longer narrow. It has been blown wide open, and this is the first generation in all of history to stand in the flood of it, going about its business as though it still lived in the old scarcity, still waiting on the man with the only key to the only book.

Consider what the ordinary believer now holds. In the small glass-and-metal thing that sits in his pocket this very hour, he carries what no king of Israel, no church father, no Reformer at the peril of his life ever held. He carries the entire Word of God. He carries it in a dozen translations laid side by side, to be compared in an instant. He carries behind every English word the Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New, with lexicons that will tell him in a moment what each word meant and everywhere else it is used. He carries concordances that older men compiled by candlelight over a lifetime, searchable now in the time it takes to draw a breath. He carries the commentaries of the godliest and most learned men of twenty centuries. And he carries all of it for free, in dozens of the tongues of the earth, available to anyone who can read and is willing to look.

Grasp what has happened. The very bottleneck that made the teacher the people’s only pipe to the water, the cost of the book, the rarity of the book, the locked-away languages, the inability to read, every last one of those barriers has fallen in our own time. Tyndale was strangled and burned for the crime of putting the Scriptures into plain English so that, as he said, the boy that driveth the plough might know them. Men died for the page the modern Christian scrolls past. And the church, for whom they died, holds the finished prize in its idle hands and reaches instead for the summary, the devotional, the secondhand sip, as though the great library purchased with their blood were locked, when in truth the door stands open and it has simply never walked in.

Men died for the page you scroll past.

The tools do not make a scholar overnight, and there is labor in it, blessed labor, and we shall speak of how to do it. But let this be said plainly: the believer who pleads that he cannot get at the deep things of the Word is, in this day, very nearly always pleading a poverty he does not actually suffer. The riches are in his hand. He has merely grown used to being fed, and the spoon has begun to feel like the only way to eat.

Here is the turn this whole book hangs upon. It used to be that a man could not go to the source, and so another went for him. Now he can. The water that once had to be carried in a cup may now be drunk straight from the river, and the river is at his feet. The only question left, and it is a searching one, is whether he will keep standing in the old line out of habit, or bend down at last and drink.

chapter four

the Spirit will teach you, if

A word of caution here, for the well is open and the Word is in every hand, and a certain kind of man will hear that and march off thinking the whole business a matter of cleverness and effort, that he need only apply a sharp enough mind to the page and the meaning will fall out like a nut from its shell. That is not it at all. The Word is not finally unlocked by intellect. It is unlocked by the Spirit. And that changes everything about how a man must come to it.

There is the reason a brilliant unbeliever may know the Greek better than any of us and still miss the living heart of the Book entirely, while a humble saint with a plain translation drinks deeply of its truth. The things of the Spirit are spiritually discerned. The Author must open His own book, or it stays shut no matter how hard a man pries. And the glory of the gospel is that the Author has come to live inside every believer for exactly this purpose.

So the believer is not sent to the Word alone, to sink or swim by his own wits. He is sent to it with the Teacher Himself indwelling him, pledged to guide him into all truth. That is the engine of the whole thing. That is why the plowboy and the housewife and the prisoner with a smuggled Bible have, again and again across the centuries, come to know the deep things of God that the proud scholar missed. The Spirit was their Teacher, and He is no respecter of diplomas.

But there is a condition to this teaching, and it is not a condition of cleverness. It is a condition of fellowship. The Spirit guides the believer who walks with Him. And sin cherished and unconfessed, sin a man has made his peace with and tucked away and refused to give up, will quench and grieve that very Spirit and cloud the eyes He means to open.

Mark it well. The man who comes to the open Word with open and unrepented sin in his heart is like a man trying to read by a lamp he has himself half-smothered. The light is not the trouble. His hand upon the wick is the trouble. This is why two believers may read the very same chapter and one find it a closed and lifeless thing while the other finds it ablaze with the voice of God; the difference very often lies not in the brain but in the heart, not in the study but in the walk.

The light is not the trouble. The hand upon the wick is the trouble.

So the first counsel of this whole book, before ever a lexicon is opened or a translation compared, is this: get right with God. Come to the Word in fellowship, with a heart confessed and willing and surrendered, and ask the Author to teach, and then expect that He will. For He has promised to, and He does not lie. The well is open; but it is the clean of heart who see most clearly into the water.

chapter five

not just reading it

Now to the practical matter, for it is no use filling a man with grand feeling about the open well and then leaving him on the bank with no notion how to drink. There is a way to go to the Word that is more than a fond and drifting reading, and it is worth setting down plainly, the way an older sister would set it down across a table.

Begin with what must be left behind. There is a manner of doing devotions that has grown very common and very nearly worthless, in which a man reads a short passage quickly, perhaps from a little dated book that prints a verse and a warm paragraph beside it, and then asks the one fatal question: what does this mean to me? What do I feel this is saying? And whatever rises up in the feelings is taken to be the meaning, and the book is closed, and the soul is no better fed than before.

See the error. It has put a man’s feelings in the chair that belongs to the text. It asks what the verse means to him before it has done the harder and humbler work of asking what the verse meant when the Holy Spirit caused it to be written, to those people, in that tongue, in that hour. And a verse cannot mean now what it never meant then. That is the whole foundation, and the world’s way of reading kicks it out from under the house on the first page.

Here is the better way, and it is within the reach of anyone holding the tools already named. First, read the passage in its place, not a lonely verse pried loose, but the paragraph and the chapter and the book around it, so that a man sees what is actually being said and to whom. Ask the old, sound questions: who wrote this, and to whom, and why? What had just been said? What comes next? A verse kept in its context will keep a man out of nine-tenths of all the error there is.

Then go down into the words themselves. This is the part our fathers could scarcely dream of, and we treat it as nothing. When a word strikes, look it up in the Hebrew or the Greek; a man need not know the languages to begin; the tools will lay the meaning open and show everywhere else that same word is used, and there is no schooling in Scripture like watching how the Spirit uses a word across the whole of His Book. Get onto a good study program; there are fine ones, and free ones; and learn to use a concordance and a lexicon. It is simpler than a man fears, and sweeter than he expects.

And then, not first, but then, go and see what the faithful teachers have said. Take up the good commentaries; see how Wiersbe opened it, how the older expositors weighed it, what the long line of sound men understood a hard word or a disputed phrase to mean. No man is the first to read this chapter, and humility will send him to those who labored before him. But mark the order, for the order is everything: the text first, and the teachers after, as helps to a man’s own reading, not the other way round, where he swallows another man’s conclusion and never troubles the text at all.

And when all this is done, the passage read in context, the words dug into, the faithful teachers weighed, there comes the last and most needful grace: to know the difference between what is certain and what is not. Some things the Word states plainly, repeatedly, beyond all honest dispute, and on those a man may plant his feet and never be moved. Other things it touches once, or in a hard word, or leaves genuinely open, and on those the honest believer holds his view with an open hand and does not break fellowship over what God did not make plain.

Rightly dividing, there is the whole craft of it in a phrase. Be firm where the Word is firm, and humble where the Word is quiet, and learn by the Spirit’s help to tell the one from the other. That is what it is to go to the well and truly drink, and not merely to wet the lips and call it done.

chapter six

why they do not want you to

Now to a harder word, and it will not be softened, because it is true and because the reader is owed the truth. If the well is open, and the Word is in every hand, and the Spirit Himself is given as Teacher, then why is this not preached from every pulpit in the land? Why are the people not told, week upon week, to go home and search the Scriptures for themselves until they can feed their own souls? Why does the great drift of so much that calls itself ministry run toward keeping the people coming back, listening, buying, dependent, rather than toward working itself joyfully out of a job?

Here is the plain and uncomfortable reason. It does not hold for every teacher, for there are faithful ones who want nothing more than to see the people grown and standing on their own feet in the Word. But it holds for more teachers, men and women alike, than the church likes to admit, and I would say the vast majority. A teacher whose livelihood, whose platform, whose sense of his own importance depends upon the people needing him will rarely be the one to tell them they do not need him. The gatekeeper does not, as a rule, knock down his own gate.

Consider it honestly. If a teacher’s income rises with the size of the crowd that cannot do without him; if his name is made great precisely by how many lean upon it; if his books sell to the degree that people would rather read about the Word than read the Word; then every incentive he has runs the wrong direction. It pays him for the people’s dependence and costs him their maturity. He need not scheme it; most do not. The pull is quieter than scheming. A man finds it wonderfully easy to believe that the thing which happens to feed him is also the thing the Lord requires, and so he keeps the people at his table and calls it shepherding, when a truer shepherd would be teaching them to find the green pasture themselves.

The honest teacher does the very opposite of clutching. He is forever pointing past himself. He says, in effect: do not take my word for it; here is the text, go and see whether these things are so. He hands out the tools and shoves the people toward the water and rejoices, actually rejoices, on the day they no longer need him to fetch it. He measures his success not by how many still depend on him but by how many he has grown up into men and women who can open the Book and be fed by the Spirit without him in the room at all.

Look at what is praised there, and by whom. These Bereans were commended, called more noble, for the very act of checking the apostle Paul himself against the Scriptures. They did not simply swallow the great man’s preaching; they went home and searched the text daily to see whether what even he said was so. And the Holy Spirit set that down in the eternal record as the noble thing to do. If it was noble to test an apostle against the Word, how much more the favorite teacher, the podcast, the study book, and how much more this very booklet the reader holds in his hand.

chapter seven

the same game everywhere

Step back from the church for a moment, for this pattern, the keeper of the gate who profits from the people’s dependence and so will never tell them the gate is open, is no peculiar sin of pastors. It is woven through the whole fallen world, and once a man has seen it in one place he will see it everywhere. Consider it where he would least expect it, for seeing it elsewhere will help him trust his eyes when he sees it at home.

Consider the great clamor of our day over the thinking machines, what the world calls artificial intelligence. I have written elsewhere, at length, on why the Christian need not fear it at all, and I will not travel that whole road again here. But mark one curious thing about the loudest voices of alarm. A great many of the very men who stand upon the stages and warn the world in grave tones that this technology may doom us all, that it must be feared, slowed, watched, are the very same men who go straight back from the stage to building it as fast as their fortunes allow.

Ask the simple question a child would ask. If they truly believed the thing they are building would end the world, would they not stop building it? A man who believed the bridge would collapse does not keep driving cars onto it. That they do not stop tells you something they will not say aloud: that they do not, at bottom, believe their own alarm, or that something else is at work beneath it. And what is at work, very often, is the oldest game there is. The technology threatens to knock down the gate, to put knowledge and skill and capacity that once required the experts into the hands of ordinary people. And so the warning serves a second purpose its hearers never suspect: it keeps the crowd anxious, deferential, and convinced that only the high priests of the thing can be trusted to handle it. Be afraid, they say, and leave it to us.

See it now. It is the very same shape as the teacher who will not tell the people the well is open. The expert who profits from dependence will say whatever keeps them dependent, and he will dress it in the language of their own protection. The pastor dresses it as spiritual safety; the technologist dresses it as the safety of the world; but underneath the robes it is one creature, and it is as old as the serpent who first persuaded a woman that God was holding out on her and that she had better listen to a more knowing voice than His.

And here is the one word the Christian must never lose in all of it: we, of all people, have no business being ruled by the world’s manufactured fears, of the machine or of anything else. We know how the story ends, for the Author has told us. The unbeliever trembles at the unknown because for him the unknown is genuinely unmastered; he has no sovereign Lord holding the last page. We do. So when the gatekeepers of any age trade in fear to keep men small and dependent, the believer may look at the whole performance with clear and untroubled eyes, and walk past it, and go drink.

chapter eight

grow up

There is a thing that ought to happen to a believer over the years, and in a great many it simply never does, and the church has grown so used to its not happening that it has stopped expecting it at all. It is this: as a man grows in Christ, he ought to need less leading by the hand, not more. He ought to move, over time, from being fed to feeding himself, and from being fed to feeding others. That is what growing up is. And a Christian twenty and thirty years along who still cannot open his Bible without a man at his elbow to tell him what it says has not grown up. He has only grown older.

He has not grown up. He has only grown older.

This is not said harshly. It is said the way Scripture itself says it, which is harder than any of us would dare to say it on our own.

Hear the rebuke in it, and hear that it is a rebuke. By this time, the writer says, you ought to be teachers, and instead you still need someone to spoon you the first lessons over again, like grown men sent back to sit among the infants. It is named a failure. It is not held up as humble or safe or properly deferential. It is held up as a shame: that those who by the calendar should be feeding others are still gumming milk because they never learned to chew.

And see what this means for the whole question of teachers. The very aim of good teaching is to make itself less necessary over time. The faithful teacher is like a good parent, whose whole labor bends toward the day the child walks on his own. A mother does not count it a triumph that her grown son still cannot feed himself; she counts it a grief, and a sign that something has gone wrong in the raising. Just so, the teaching that keeps the people permanently and equally dependent, year after year with no growth toward standing on their own in the Word, has failed at the one thing it was for, however warm it feels, however faithfully they attend.

So let the plain thing be said, and let it be as bracing as it is. I hold firmly to what the Bible teaches about the pastor and the teacher in the local church. Those are God-given gifts, and I would never wave them away. But Scripture itself teaches that as a man grows in Christ he is meant to lean on them less, not more, to move from being fed to feeding himself.

The church does not need its teachers the way it once needed them, because it now has what it once lacked: the open Word in every hand, and the whole inheritance of Spirit-filled pastors and teachers who came before. And as a man grows, he should lean on them less, not because they are bad, but because he is growing, which is the entire point. To stay forever a dependent child and call it humility is to baptize a failure and hang it on the wall. The Lord means to grow His people up. Let Him. Take the meat. Learn to chew.

chapter nine

on the shoulders of the laborers

Lest anything said here be twisted into a contempt I do not hold, let me turn and pay a debt, for everything in this book, including the reader’s very ability to read it, was bought at a tremendous price by men whose names most believers could not so much as recite. It would be a poor sort of freedom that forgot the ones who purchased it.

The reader holds an English Bible. Consider only that. Men gave their lives, their actual, breathing lives, that he might. William Tyndale labored in exile and hiding to turn the Scriptures into plain English, and was betrayed, and strangled, and burned, and his dying prayer was that the Lord would open the king of England’s eyes. The page a man finds too much trouble to read was carried to him out of a literal fire. Behind Tyndale stand the long ranks of the faithful: the scribes who copied the sacred text letter by letter through the centuries, the scholars who learned the dying tongues and built the lexicons, the translators who carried the Word into language after language, the expositors who spent whole lifetimes mining a single book so that a man could read its riches in an afternoon.

My own debts are particular, and I name them gladly, for I invented nothing and would have it known. I sit under teachers far wiser than myself, most now gone home to the Lord, teaching me still through what they left behind, as I said in the about-the-author pages of this booklet.

So when this book says go to the Word yourself, understand what it does and does not mean. It does not say despise these laborers; God forbid; it says honor them in the one way that actually honors them. For how would Tyndale have a man treat the English Bible he died to give him? By leaving it shut and living on summaries? Or by reading it, reading it for himself, drinking deep of the very thing Tyndale poured out his life to put in his hand? No man thanks those who bled to give him the Book by refusing to open it. He thanks them by using what they bought.

Here is the great difference, and it must not be missed: there is a faithful handing-down and there is a faithless one. The faithless one is the game of telephone, where each man takes his religion secondhand from the last, and no one checks the source, and the message bends a little with every mouth until what is preached bears only a cousin’s resemblance to what is written. The faithful handing-down is otherwise: a line of men who each drove the next back to the text, who stood on the shoulders of those before them only to see the Book more clearly, and who pointed always past themselves to the Word and the Spirit. That is the line I come from. That is the line I am calling the reader to join. Stand on their shoulders, and then look at the Book with your own eyes.

chapter ten

why this is free

And now, My Friend, in this last chapter, let me tell you the thing I have touched upon and held back, and in the telling you will understand both why everything I make is given away for nothing and why I am so certain of all I have said about the open well, for I am, myself, a living proof of it.

My pastor is Dr. J. Vernon McGee. I have never met the man. Sit with that a moment, for it is the whole of the matter in a single strange fact. He went home to be with the Lord before I was so much as born. I never heard his voice in a room, never shook his hand, never sat in a pew while he preached. And yet he is my pastor; has been, is, and will be until the day I go home to the very place where he now is. He pastored me across the gulf of death itself, through nothing more than a thing recorded and preserved and freely given: his Thru the Bible program, that patient five-year journey through the whole Word that he called the Bible Bus. I climbed aboard, and rode it through the entire Book, and when I reached the end I started again, and I have ridden it round multiple times over. A man I never met taught me the whole counsel of God.

See what that is. It is this entire book made flesh. The well, open across time. The teaching of a faithful man, preserved and laid free and reaching a girl not yet born when he spoke, reaching her precisely because he gave it away rather than locking it behind a gate. And he himself did not spring from nowhere; he sat under teachers, and labored among a fellowship of sound men who sharpened one another and stood on the ones before them, so that what came to me through him carried the whole stream of them with it. He is the near end of a long faithful line, and every man in it pointed past himself to the Book. That is the honorable handing-down. McGee is my proof that it is real, because I am its beneficiary, taught by a man in glory through what he freely left behind.

And here is the thing I caught from him above all the rest, not only the doctrine, but the open hand. For he said it constantly, in that warm and homely Texan way of his: here it is, take it, it is free, share it with whomever you please. He did not hoard the preaching of the Word or sell access to it or build a gate around it and charge admission. He flung it out as wide and as free as he could, and trusted the Lord with the rest. And when I came to write these things, I knew, because he had shown me, that I would do the same. Everything I make is free. I have never taken a penny for any of it, and I never will, and the reason has already been told: the Lord has provided for me richly by other means, and I simply do not need this to feed me. I am free of the need, and so I am free to give.

The only thing I want for you, My Friend, is the one thing I cannot do for another soul: that he would go, himself, to the open well, with the Spirit as his Teacher, and drink.