Her Body Still Braces At The Trumpet

The band went to that song, and about four bars in a horn came up underneath it, and her shoulders went.

Before anything. Before a thought, before a word, before she had the least idea it was happening. Two inches, up and slightly forward, the way a body moves when it is expecting a noise.

She noticed it because she was standing at the side and could see her own reflection in the glass door.

Here is what makes this hard to sit with. She could preach the grace of God on any other page in that book with her eyes shut. She has done it for years. Somebody in that room this morning is walking around forgiven because she stood up and told them the truth about what God is like, and she meant every word and she still means it.

And a horn comes up in a song and her body goes.

She knows exactly where it comes from. She has known for a long time and knowing has not shifted it one inch.

She was nine, in a hall, with the lights down and a man with a very good voice, and the whole subject was handed to her as a threat. Not as good news. As a thing that could happen tonight and that she might not be ready for, and she went home and lay in the dark listening for it.

And here is the part she has never said out loud to anybody in fourteen years of ministry.

She never really stopped listening for it.

Her doctrine moved. Everything she teaches moved. Her body did not get the message, and it has been holding a nine year old's posture underneath a grown woman's theology for about forty years.

If something moves in you before your mind gets there, come and take a chair at the side. There is nothing being asked of anybody's shoulders this morning.

The order of the words in that verse

There is a verse most people know the front half of, and the order of the clauses is the whole medicine.

But now thus saith the Lord that created thee, O Jacob, and he that formed thee, O Israel, Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine.Isaiah 43:1

Fear not comes first, and then, immediately, the reason.

And the reason is not an argument. It is not information about timing, or a warning about consequences, or an appeal to anybody's courage. The reason is a redemption that has already happened and a name that has already been called.

I have called thee by thy name. Past tense. Done, before the sentence gets to the fear at all.

You are somebody God called by name before He ever said one word about being afraid. Isaiah 43:1 puts the redeeming and the naming in the completed past and hangs the fear not on them, and the Holy Spirit kept that order rather than the other way round, which means the ground under your shoulders was laid before the flinch ever arrived.

A body can hold a posture a doctrine has left

Now what actually happened at the side of that hall, because it deserves better than being treated as a spiritual problem.

Nothing about that reflection in the glass is a report on your faith.

A body learns. It learns fast at nine, in the dark, with the lights down and a good voice, and it keeps what it learned long after the mind has been over the ground and settled it. That is not weak faith. That is a nervous system doing precisely the job it was built to do.

You were a child when that was laid down, and no verse anywhere charges a grown woman with what was put on a nine year old. Psalm 103:14 says He knoweth our frame, He remembereth that we are dust, and it is written as the reason for God's tenderness rather than as an allowance being made, and it is the same Spirit who is called the Comforter, which means the God watching your shoulders go this morning knows exactly where that started and is not looking at it the way you are.

Nothing here is going to use fear on you

Let us say plainly what will not happen on this page, because the bracing starts early and costs something all by itself.

No scenarios. Nothing off the news, nothing read as a countdown, no describing of anything designed to make anybody's stomach drop. That was done to you once and it will not be done here.

You are not being moved by dread, and nothing being handed over this morning runs on it. 2 Timothy 1:7 says God hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind, and the Spirit named there is the one given in place of the fear, which means the man with the good voice was working with something God had not issued.