Every Word Without the Card

The font is at the back of the church and the radiators are on too high and his sister keeps mouthing sorry at him across the top of the baby's head.

The minister hands him a small printed card with the responses on it. He looks at it, and he hands it back with a small smile, because he does not need it.

And then the questions come, and he says every word.

Not haltingly. Not the way people do when they are reading something for the first time in front of strangers. He says it the way you say your own address. He means it, all of it, every clause, in a warm room with his family behind him and a baby going pink in his arms, and there is not one syllable of it he would take back or cross his fingers behind.

Afterwards there is cake in the hall and somebody's uncle is being funny about the parking, and his sister comes over and says, you knew the whole thing, and he says, yeah.

He goes to get a paper cup of tea and it lands on him at the urn, quietly, the way these things do.

He has not said any of that to God on his own since he cannot remember when. Not one line of it. Not out loud, not under his breath, not in a car. He knows every word of it and he could not tell you the last time any of it went anywhere except into a room.

You are the one at the urn. You would say every word too, and you would mean it, and nobody in that room was fooled and nobody was being fooled. That is the whole difficulty. The belief is not the problem. The belief is completely intact, and somewhere along the line that started counting as the proof that nothing was wrong.

He is not a fraud and neither are you

Start here, and let me be blunt about it, because everything downstream depends on getting this right.

He was not performing. What he said at that font was true, he believed it while he said it, and if you had pulled him aside afterward and asked him whether he meant it, he would have looked at you like you had asked him whether he meant his own name.

Nothing in this article is going to take his faith off him. I am not going to suggest it is thin, or borrowed, or a habit he mistook for the real thing. That is the accusation people expect at this point and it would be false, and false is not something I am willing to be even in a good cause.

So the belief stands. Here is what actually happened to it.

Belief got quietly assigned a job it was never built for. It became the receipt. As long as I still believe every word, nothing is wrong, and I do not need to look at anything else. And it works, for a long time, because it is true. He does believe it. The receipt is genuine.

Now look at what the writer of Hebrews does with that, and watch the verbs, because there are two of them and almost nobody separates them.

Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering; for he is faithful that promised.Hebrews 10:22-23

Draw near. Then, separately, hold fast the profession. Two commands, side by side, one verse apart, and they are not the same activity.

You have held the profession fast, and that has never once been in question, and the drawing near is a different verb and it is standing wide open to you. That is not my read of your life; it is written in Hebrews 10 in two consecutive sentences, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept the profession alive in your mouth all this time, which is not nothing. It is the half of it you have been doing faithfully.

The nearness was bought, not built

Now the thing that will actually let you move, which is a question about who did the work on the road.

Read what stands three verses earlier, because the writer sets the ground before he asks anybody for anything.

Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh.Hebrews 10:19-20

Boldness to enter. Not permission earned. Not access granted on review. Boldness, by the blood, which means the nerve to walk in was purchased by somebody else and handed over, and there is no version of it you assemble yourself out of good recent behavior.

And the way in is called new and living. The Greek behind new there is a strange, physical word. It means freshly killed, the way you say meat is fresh. It is a word about something that has not had time to spoil.

Which is exactly the fear, is it not. That a way you have not used in years has gone off. That the road is technically still there but it has weeds through it now and you would be the man who turns up at a door he has not knocked on since he was young.

You have a road that does not stale, and boldness to walk it that was bought and never built. Hebrews 10:19 puts that in writing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps that way living, so the length of time since you last used it has no bearing at all on whether it opens.

Say one true thing, in the present tense, about yourself

Here is the small strange thing I noticed at the font, and I think it is the hinge of the whole business.

Every word he said was about God. The faith, the Son, the Spirit, the church, the forgiveness of sins. All of it doctrinally exact, all of it warmly meant, all of it in the third person.

What he had not said in a very long time was a sentence in the present tense about himself.

Not God is faithful. He could preach that. I am His. Now. Today. Out loud, about me, with nobody applauding.

That is the sentence that has gone quiet, and it went quiet without anybody deciding, and the reason it matters is that the profession you hold fast is a statement about God, while drawing near is something that happens to a person. You cannot draw near in the third person.

You have every right to say a present-tense sentence about yourself tonight, and it is not a claim you are making, it is a fact you are agreeing with. Hebrews 10:22 tells you to draw near in full assurance, and full assurance is not a mood you generate: the Holy Spirit is the one who bears witness with your own spirit about whose you are, and He has been doing it while you were quiet.