A Clear Word of Instruction

The fall of 1966 was a busy time for me. That fall I had three full-time jobs. During the summer of that year, I had been called to pastor Pine Grove Baptist Church near Florien, Louisiana. Near the end of August, I had begun teaching at Florien High School, and for the past four years I had been dating Danielle full-time. This last job was enjoyable, but it was also very time-consuming and did not pay very well. The result of all of this was that I was stretched pretty thin.

In my job as pastor, I had to come up with two sermons and a Bible study each week as well as take care of all the other responsibiities of being a pastor. I did my best, but the time crunch took its toll. Had it not been for the kindness and longsuffering of the folks at Pine Grove, I wouldn’t have survived.

At Florien High School, I taught geography and civics as well as two tenth-grade English classes and an eleventh-grade English class. I had to prepare four separate lessons each day. The only way that I survived at school was by depending on my mother who had taught English for many years.

I was teaching a unit on “Biographies” in English so my mom gave me a ditto sheet with some activities to use. One of the activities that I chose was to have them write a 7-page biography of someone they knew. When I handed out the assignment, my students let out a howl. “Seven pages! We’ll never be able to write that much.”

I knew that this assignment had been tested by my mother over the past 30 years so I didn’t cut them any slack. “Of course you can write seven pages. This person about whom you are writing has lived a long time and done a lot of things. You can easily find enough material to fill seven pages.” So, with considerable grumbling and griping, they worked on the assignment over the next couple of weeks.

As I was grading their papers, I remarked to my mom that the students had really done a lot of griping about having to write seven pages. She looked at me with a puzzled expression and said, “Seven pages?” “Yes,” I said, “that’s what the ditto sheet called for.” She said, “Let me look at that.”

Taking the ditto sheet that had grown slightly faint because of many copies being made, she said, “That’s not a ‘7.’ That’s a ‘3.’” “Oh,” I said. I never had the heart to tell my students that I had made a mistake in reading the instructions.

It’s important to have reliable instructions. In 1716, an edition of the King James Bible was printed in which there was a printing error. In the account of Jesus’ healing of the man at the pool of Bethesda, Jesus said in John 5:14, “Behold, thou art made whole: sin no more.” In the 1716 printing, the printer had printed, “Sin on more.” Evidently some people today still use that printing because that tends to be the pattern of their lives.

I am grateful that Scripture gives us a clear and concise word from God. There is no confusion. God challenges us to “sin no more.”