The Verse She Is Best At And Cannot Take

She can put that verse in a room like a fire in a grate.

Fourteen years she has been doing it. When a church has been through something and somebody has to stand up and say the thing that makes people able to breathe again, hers is the number that gets called, and she goes, and she does it, and it works.

She has watched grown men stand up under that word and shake. She has seen a woman who had not spoken in a service in nine years open her mouth.

She believes every syllable of it. That has to be said plainly and it has to be said first. There is not one ounce of pretending in what she carries into those rooms.

It just will not go in.

It goes out of her at full strength and it does not come back. It gets to about the collarbone and stops, and she is standing there in front of two hundred people watching it work on all of them while it slides off her.

Here is what she has told nobody in fourteen years.

She has started to dread being asked for it.

Somebody rang her last month and asked her to bring that word again, at a thing, and something went down inside her before she had said anything at all. And she said yes, of course, and she went, and she brought it, and it landed the way it always lands.

And she drove home and sat in the car outside her own house and could not pray.

Not would not. Could not. Nothing came, and she sat there with her hands on the wheel and had one thought that frightened her badly enough that she has never let herself finish it.

If it is true, then how long.

She stopped it there. She has stopped it there every time since. Because she is the woman who brings that word, and there is a question underneath it that she is not allowed to ask, and she has never in her life said it out loud.

If there is something you can hand out and cannot keep, come on in and take a chair at the back. Nobody is going to ask you to bring anything.

Somebody asked it out loud and it got a number

There is a psalm with a question in it that most believers have thought and almost none have said, and it is sitting there in the middle of the songbook with a number on the front of it.

Hath God forgotten to be gracious? hath he in anger shut up his tender mercies?Psalm 77:9

Read it again and let it be as bad as it is.

That is not a rhetorical flourish. That is a man asking, out loud, in writing, whether God has forgotten. And it was collected, and numbered, and set to music, and given to the congregation to sing.

Nobody crossed it out. Nobody put a footnote under it explaining that of course he did not really mean it. It stands exactly as he asked it.

You are holding a question that Scripture kept rather than corrected, and it has a psalm number. Psalm 77:9 puts the asking into the songbook of God's own people in the plainest words available, and the Holy Spirit preserved it without hurrying to answer it in the very next line, which means the thing you have never let yourself finish in the car is already finished, in writing, in the book you preach out of.

The word did not fail on the way in

Now the collarbone, because that is where the shame lives and it has been living there fourteen years.

You have been reading it as a verdict. The word works on everybody in the room and stops at you, therefore something about you is the problem. That reading is wrong and it is worth taking apart.

You are not the reason it has not gone in, and no gap between what you carry and what you feel has ever been treated as a fault. Hebrews 4:12 says the word of God is quick and powerful and sharper than any twoedged sword, and it is written of the word rather than of the person receiving it, and it is the Holy Spirit who applies it in His own timing rather than a believer talking it into themselves, which means the delay is on nobody's account and least of all yours.

The word did not fail. It has not been refused. It is simply not doing on your timetable what it did on theirs, and you have been reading a schedule as a judgment.

Nobody here is going to answer the question quickly

Let us say what is not going to happen on this page, because the bracing has been going on since the first line.

Nobody is going to tell you to hope harder. Nobody is going to explain the fourteen years. And nobody is going to rush past the first half of the proverb to hand you the tree of life before the first half has been allowed to stand up in this room.

You are not being charged with unbelief, and the sickness you carry has never once been read that way. Proverbs 13:12 says hope deferred maketh the heart sick and stops there, with no correction and no remedy attached to the clause, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept it in that exact order, which means what is happening in you is what the word says happens to a person who waits a long time.