The Testimony She Gave Too Early

She stood up in that room and said it, and the room did what a room does.

It was not a long testimony. About ninety seconds. She said what had been going on and she said what God had done about it, and there was that sound a room makes, and somebody at the back said something, and two women found her afterwards and held on to her hands.

She meant every word.

Here is the thing. It was not finished.

She knew that when she stood up, in the way you know a thing and put it in a drawer, and she stood up anyway, because it was so nearly finished and because the room was right there and because after four years of nothing you take the moment when it comes.

It came apart over the following eleven months.

Not dramatically. Slowly, in the way things do, and by the following autumn there was nothing left of it and everybody in that hall knew, because it is that sort of room and word travels kindly and thoroughly.

Nobody has ever said a word to her about the testimony. Not one person.

And she still goes. Every week, into the same hall, past the same people, and she stands roughly where she stood, and she has never once mentioned it and neither has anybody else.

If you have stood up too soon, come and stand over here with a tea. Nobody is going to ask you what happened.

The mercies are issued daily, and the issue is not performance based

There is a line written from inside the ruins of a city, and its position in that book is the entire point.

It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22 and 23

A man is sitting in the worst circumstances of his life writing the bleakest poetry in Scripture, and in the middle of it he says something about supply.

New every morning. Not renewed when you have got it right. Not restored once the record is clean. Issued fresh, daily, on a schedule that has nothing whatever to do with how the previous day went, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept that line in a book written by a man watching a city burn, so the newness is a fact about God rather than a mood about the weather.

Which means the morning after is covered. Every morning after is covered. That is precisely the arrangement being described.

You are met with mercy that was issued this morning rather than earned last year. Lamentations 3:23 puts the mercies on a daily arrival rather than a merit system, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a sentence like that something a person can stand on rather than admire, which means the eleven months are not sitting between you and today.

The timing was wrong. That is not the same as the faith.

Now the distinction, and I am going to make it plainly because the soft version is no use to a woman who has to walk back into that hall.

You stood up too soon. That is true. You knew it at the time and you did it anyway, and I am not going to explain that away, because a person who is told she was not really wrong knows she is being handled.

But look at what was actually wrong in those ninety seconds, because it was one thing and not the whole of it.

The timing was wrong. What you said about God was not. He had been doing something, you were not making it up, and the thing you thanked Him for was real. You put a full stop where there was not one yet, and a full stop in the wrong place is a mistake about a sentence rather than a lie about its subject.

You are still standing in the thing you were actually standing in, and it did not come apart with the circumstances. 2 Timothy 1:12 has a man saying I know whom I have believed, with a Person as the object rather than an outcome, and it is His Spirit who keeps that fastened in somebody whose outcome has fallen over publicly.

And I am not going to tell you why it came apart. Nobody knows. Anybody offering you a reason across a hall is guessing at your life and will go home afterwards.

You are not carrying a debt to that room, and no account is outstanding. Romans 14:4 asks who are you to judge another man's servant, since to his own master he stands or falls, and it is the Holy Spirit who actually holds a servant up, which means the verdict of forty kind people was never the one that decides anything about you.

God is the one holding you, and He held you through all eleven of those months, including the ones where you kept going anyway.