It Came Out Clear

The kid is sixteen and he works Saturdays and half of Thursday evening, and he is good, which is not something you say out loud to a sixteen year old too early.

They are forking the last of the bedding down the far end of the barn, both of them tired in the good way, and the light coming in low through the doorway is turning the dust into something worth stopping for. Radio going in the tack room. A calf complaining about nothing.

The boy stops with the fork half up and says it the way boys say things, with no run at it: Do you actually believe all that. Not unkindly. Not looking at him. Just asked, the way you would ask about a tire pressure.

And it comes out of him. Whole. Not a hunt for the words, not a shuffle, not the careful hedged thing he might have expected out of himself. He says that God made the world and did not walk off from it. He says that Jesus Christ came down into it and died and got up again on the third day, and that it happened, in a place, on a date, to a body. He says that a man is not put right by being good enough and never was. He says it plainly, in about ninety seconds, in a barn, holding a fork.

The boy says huh. Then he says, all right, and goes back to the bedding, because he is sixteen and the day is nearly over.

And the man stands there with his hand on the fork and hears it back.

Every word of that is true. He has never doubted one syllable of it in his life. And he has not lived within a mile of it in longer than he can account for, and both of those things came out of the same mouth in the same ninety seconds, and he does not know what to do with a man who is both.

You have stood in that doorway. Somebody asked you, or nobody did and you asked yourself, and it came out clear, and the clearness was the part that unsettled you.

The belief is not a costume

I want to take the first thing off you before we go anywhere, because most people carrying this are carrying it wrong.

The belief is real. That is not me being generous. A man who can give the whole thing back to a sixteen year old, in order, in ninety seconds, with no run at it, is not reciting something he privately thinks is nonsense. Recitation stumbles. Rehearsal shows. What came out in that doorway came out from underneath, the way your own address comes out.

So the conclusion you may have reached, that the intact belief must therefore be a costume, is not the true reading of it. And the opposite conclusion, that intact belief proves nothing is wrong, is not the true reading either. Both of those are cheap, and you have been standing between them a long while trying to pick.

You are a believer and you are a long way off, and those two facts sit in the same man without one of them being a lie about the other. That is not my arithmetic. Scripture puts both in the same breath more than once, and it is the Holy Spirit who lets you hold them at the same time without flinching, because He is not the accuser and never has been.

The word never got further away than your mouth

Here is where Paul goes when he is describing this exact thing, and notice he is not describing an achievement.

But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy heart: that is, the word of faith, which we preach.Romans 10:8

Nigh thee. In thy mouth. In thy heart. Paul is quoting Moses, who was saying it to people who had every reason to think the thing was far off and up a mountain and out of reach. And the answer given to them was that it is not in heaven and it is not across the sea. It is in your mouth. You just used it in a barn.

You are carrying the word in your own mouth right now, and it did not have to be fetched from anywhere. I am not putting a good face on your situation; that is Romans 10:8 exactly as it is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept the word lodged there through all of it, in a man who was not using it for anything, which is precisely the point He is making.

Think about what that means about the distance. Distance is a real thing, and I am not going to soften it into a mood. But the distance was never between you and the word. The word has been at zero range the entire time. What went long was the use of it, and use is not the same as possession, and the possession is what Paul is talking about.

Nearness is His verb, not your effort

Now the second half, and this is the one I would not want you to leave without.

A man in my trade knows what it costs to move something heavy. So when a person tells me that coming near to God is going to take a season of effort, some rebuilding, a run of good weeks first, I recognize the estimate. It is the estimate of a man pricing a job. And it is the wrong estimate, because he has priced a job that is already done.

The LORD is nigh unto all them that call upon him, to all that call upon him in truth.Psalm 145:18

Present tense. Not becomes nigh. Is nigh. The nearness is not the reward at the end of the calling; the nearness is the condition the calling happens inside. He is near to all of them, and the psalm does not sort them by how long since the last time.

You are near right now, and the nearness is His doing and not the size of your effort. That is written in Psalm 145 in the present tense, and the Holy Spirit is the one closing that gap while you read, not you and not your resolve about next week.

And what came out of your mouth in that doorway, or in the truck, or wherever the question found you, was not you performing. It was the word that has been near you the whole time, doing what a near thing does when somebody asks a straight question.