Over thirty years ago Ernest T. Campbell published a book of sermons with the unsettling title, Locked in a Room with Open Doors.
If you think about that image, it can make your palms sweat and your nervous system shiver.
Millions of men and women, of course, are trapped in rooms with closed doors. They lack education or the ability to read.
They feel comfortable where they are and have no interest or motivation to change. Opportunities open to others are simply not open to them. They do what they can with what they have.
It is something else, though, to be locked in a room with open doors.
The most confining lock-in involves our refusal to handle new ways of thinking. We can be stuck in place when we feel we are justified by some practice rather than by faith.
As a case in point, many evangelical ministers have been trained to study the Bible in seminary. They have a reverence for the text. Yet they transfer their strong allegiance to the Scriptures to some single approach to preparing sermons that they were taught.
Most seminary students have been prepared to preach by using the epistles, and as graduates they feel comfortable with that genre of literature. Then when they come to narrative, the most-used genre in the Bible, they either ignore it or read it as though this literature is another letter to be analyzed.
Such ministers resemble the physician who was an expert at setting broken bones but wasn’t prepared to deal with other maladies. When patients came to him complaining of a stomach ache or a high fever, he would break their bones so he could treat them. Lesson: All patients and all passages are not the same.
We may be locked in a room with open doors, therefore, when it comes to reading the biblical narratives for other reasons.
Perhaps this ineptness can be traced to our childhood as well as our seminary training. If we think of biblical stories merely as bedtime tales to read to our children or as Sunday school illustrations from which to draw morals for good behavior, we will fail to read them as they really are: profound theology taught through stories.
Or if we have approached the Old Testament writings only as illustrations of New Testament truth, we will be closed to the life-altering truths the inspired writers of the first testament communicated.
There are basic techniques of the storyteller’s art that can open the reader to the large sections of narrative in the Word of God. The obstacle to using them correctly may simply be our hesitancy to enter an open door.
In addition to understanding these narratives, there are also ways of presenting them so that listeners can hear them again for the first time. One of
