Ezra is not usually the first name mentioned when people list the great figures of the Old Testament. Abraham, Moses, and David tend to crowd him out. He spent most of his life far from Jerusalem, living under Persian rule, and around 458 BC he led the second of three groups of exiles back to Judah with a royal letter and funding in hand. He was a priest by lineage and a scribe by trade. But none of that is what makes him worth studying. One verse explains him better than his résumé does. “Ezra had set his heart to study the law of the Lord, and to do it, and to teach his statutes and rules in Israel” (). Three ambitions, all of them deliberate, and every one of them available to any Christian.
A Heart Set to Study
Notice that the verse does not say Ezra was talented at study. It says he set his heart on it. That distinction matters, because becoming a capable reader of Scripture is far less about aptitude than about determination. It has to be more than an obligation being met.
Most of us have heard someone say they tried to study the Bible but could not really understand it, so they leave that to other people. What is striking is how often the same person handles genuinely difficult material elsewhere without complaint. Technical manuals, complicated hobbies, a sport with a hundred statistics to track. The capacity is there. What is missing is the resolve.
Scripture does admit that some passages are hard. Peter said Paul wrote things that were difficult to understand, and added that it was “the ignorant and unstable” who twisted them (). Notice what he identified as the actual problem. Not the difficulty of the text but the disposition of the reader. Hard to understand is not the same thing as impossible to understand. Paul plainly expected to be followed. He wrote about the mystery made known to him and then said, “When you read this, you can understand my insight into the mystery of Christ” (). He put it in writing so it could be understood.
We can ask for help. We can be taught by people further along than we are. But none of that relieves anyone of coming to terms with God’s word personally. Faith comes through contact with that word, and no one can outsource their own faith to a scholar.
A Heart Set to Do It
Ezra did not stop at study, and the order in the verse is not accidental. Scripture was never given merely to be admired, analyzed, or memorized. “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (). Teaching, reproof, correction, and training all point somewhere. They equip.
James uses an image that lands immediately. A person who hears the word without doing it is like someone who looks intently at his own face in a mirror, then walks away and forgets what he saw (). Nobody uses a mirror that way. You look in order to do something about what you find. The one who “looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres” is the one who is blessed in his doing ().
If we are honest, our trouble is usually not comprehension. We may have unanswered questions, but we generally understand what God asks of us. The gap is between knowing and carrying through. That is why Psalm 119 keeps praying for both at once. “Teach me, O Lord, the way of your statutes, and I will keep it to the end. Give me understanding, that I may keep your law and observe it with my whole heart” (). Understanding is requested for the sake of obedience, never as a substitute for it.
A Heart Set to Teach
The third ambition is the one most people quietly exempt themselves from. James did write that not many should become teachers, and it is tempting to treat that as a permanent excuse. But he was not discouraging Christians from growing into readiness. He was saying teaching is serious business, not a platform for attention.
Teaching also involves far more than standing behind a podium. Paul told Timothy to entrust what he had heard “to faithful men who will be able to teach others also” (), using the general word for people rather than a term restricted to males. Peter told ordinary Christians to be ready “to give an answer to everyone who asks you a reason concerning the hope that is in you” (). That is teaching, whether or not anyone calls it that.
Consider the instruction that older women are to “teach what is good,” training younger women in how to love their husbands and children and to live self controlled, pure, kind lives (). That can happen in a Bible class. It happens just as legitimately across a kitchen table or in a coffee shop. The same is true of the qualification that an elder be able to teach. The requirement is not that he can hold an audience for forty minutes. Some of the best teaching ever done by good men has happened one on one, with an open Bible and a cup of coffee, with someone who needed the encouragement.
The oldest form of this work is the one done at home. “These words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise” (). Bible classes are a gift, but they were never meant to be the only instruction a child receives. Children need to watch someone they love study the word and then live by it.
Where the Whole Thing Turns
There are Christians who wonder whether they are of any real use in the kingdom. The answer is in Ezra’s verse. Every one of us can open the Scriptures, and we hold a privilege most generations never had, a copy of God’s word within arm’s reach. Every one of us can decide in advance that what we find there will change how we live. And every one of us can point somebody else toward it, publicly or not.
None of that requires unusual gifts. It requires a heart that has been set. Paul finished a long chapter on the resurrection with a line worth carrying around: “Be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (). Not empty. Not wasted. It counts, and it always has.