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There are many memories I will treasure of my father, Robert Saucy, but I will write about only one now that has most profoundly impacted me—I believe, for all eternity. It was Dad’s passion for God’s Word.

I remember that for the longest time as a kid I couldn’t accurately describe what my father did for a living. “Teacher” was how it came out most of the time. If I wanted to impress somebody for some reason, it would be “teacher of systematic theology,” but I didn’t know what much of that meant until maybe college years.

But I do remember this … When I was about six or so, Dad came home from work one day with a load of books under his arms. He came in and set them all on the kitchen counter for a minute as he hurried off to something else. He didn’t see that I was watching, but before he left he carefully removed the Bible from the stack and placed it on top of all the other books.

That one simple gesture spoke sermons to me—and has ever since. As Jesus told his disciples in John’s Gospel, these were words of spirit and life. And that’s how Dad took them in his life.

I am the blessed beneficiary to say that my father lived with these words of spirit and life. One of the best classes I had in seminary—and I have heard this from many others, too—was a course that my father taught with different ones of the faculty of Rosemead on “Theology of Human Nature.” The interface of psychology and theology in that course opened to me the Bible’s teaching of the heart. And it set me on a journey to work with God in letting His life-changing Word imprint and shape my heart and life, my mind, emotions and passions.

I began that journey as a student, and I know my father was making the same journey as the course’s teacher. He would be the first to say that he came from a background where the Bible was taken quite cerebrally and cognitively. And he was good at it this way. What student overly zealous for a new truth or a half-baked old one didn’t feel the “walls closing in” under Dad’s Socratic