The Words He Meant at the Font

The building is cold in the way old buildings are cold in October, and his sister has put him in the front row because he is standing as godfather.

The baby is in a long white gown that three generations have been christened in, and she is entirely unbothered by any of it.

He knows when to stand. He has always known when to stand. And when the minister turns to the godparents and asks the questions, he answers them out loud, in his own voice, in front of forty people, and he means every word he says.

He is not performing. That is the thing worth saying plainly. He believes it. He has never doubted a line of it, not once, not through the hardest year of his life, and if you sat him down at a kitchen table and asked him what he believes and why, he would tell you, and he would be right.

The baby yawns. Somebody's phone goes off in the back and gets silenced fast.

And walking back to the pew, past the flowers and the radiator that clanks, he has the thought he has been not having for a long time. Everything he just said out loud is true. None of it is where he lives.

Not one word of it was a lie. Not one word of it was near.

He sits down, finds the hymn number, and sings it, because he knows that one too.

That is you, standing where you were asked to stand, saying true things in your own voice, aware the whole time that the truth and your life are not currently in the same room.

Nobody at that font was pretending

Let me clear one thing out of the way first, because if it stays there nothing else I say will get through.

Your belief is not fake. It was not fake at the font, and it has not been fake in the long stretch since. I have heard people handle this badly, and the way they handle it badly is to tell a man in your position that if he really believed it he would have lived nearer it, which is an accusation dressed as logic, and it is not true, and it is not what Scripture says.

Belief and nearness are two different things, and losing one of them does not prove you never had the other. A man can hold the whole deposit of it, accurately, warmly, and still not have said a word to God about his own Tuesday. That is not hypocrisy. That is distance, and distance is a location and not a character.

You are a believer with the word intact in you, and that is not a mask you are wearing, and it is not evidence against you either. I am not being generous with you here; the word of God treats real faith as real, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept it alive in you through years you were not tending it.

So we are not going to go looking for the crack in the belief. There is no crack. We are going to talk about the distance, which is the actual thing, and which is much shorter than you have been assuming.

The distance you assume, and the one Paul forbids

Here is the sentence I want in front of you, and I want you to notice what it forbids before you notice what it promises.

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

Two verses earlier Paul names the thing a person says in their heart at exactly your moment, and he tells them not to say it. Do not say, who shall ascend into heaven, to bring Christ down. Do not say, who shall descend into the deep. He is quoting Moses, and he is aiming it at a person who has decided that the God they believe in is somewhere that requires an expedition.

That is your assumption and it is the only thing in the room that is actually wrong. Not the belief. The distance you priced into it.

You have been carrying an idea that coming near again means a long formal climb: something arranged, something explained, some ascent you would have to make from where you are to where He is, and you have looked at the height of it on a Tuesday evening and thought, not tonight.

You have nothing to climb, and the height you have been measuring is not there. That is Romans 10 as it is written, and it is His Spirit who took the trouble to have that put down for exactly the person who thinks the way you have been thinking.

The nearness was already His work

Now the promise, and notice who did the moving in it.

The word is nigh thee. Already. In thy mouth and in thy heart. Paul does not say get it near. He says it is near, present tense, as a state of affairs somebody else arranged. You did not fetch it into your mouth. It was there at that font when you answered in your own voice, and it was there in the car afterward when you did not say anything at all.

This is why the distance is not what it looks like from the pew. You have been picturing yourself at one end of something and God at the other, and the picture is not accurate. He is not at the far end of anything. The word of faith is in your mouth, which is about as far away as your own tongue.

You are near because He came near, and the nearness is His doing and not the fruit of an effort you have not made. His word puts it in your mouth and in your heart, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept it lodged there through every year you did not use it.

And that is why the answer to a life like yours is never a program. A man with the word already in his mouth does not need a route. He needs to open the mouth it is already in.