God Is Good, Said At Every Meal

It is the first thing said over the bread in your house and it has been for as long as anybody can remember.

God is good. And then everybody says the second half back, and then the plates go round.

Your children learned it before they learned their letters. Guests who come once know it by the time they leave. There is a man on your street who says it now in his own house and he learned it at your table without either of you discussing it.

And you have not felt one syllable of it for about a year.

Not doubted it. That is a different thing and I want to be precise, because you have been imprecise with yourself about this and the imprecision has cost you.

You would defend that sentence in front of anybody. If somebody sat at that table and argued against it you would take them apart, kindly, over three cups of tea. Your convictions are entirely intact.

What has gone is the accompaniment. The thing underneath the words that used to make saying them a pleasure rather than a procedure.

So now you say it, and the bread goes round, and something in you notes that it went out of your mouth like a stone going into water, and then you serve.

Before anything else, hear this.

I am not accusing you of anything.

Nothing here is hypocrisy. A man saying a true thing without a feeling attached is not a liar, and I am not going to suggest to you that a year of dry gratitude is a fault to repent of.

I am saying I know what leaves your mouth over the bread. That is all.

Known before the word is out

Here is David on being known, and it is worth noticing how uncomfortable the psalm is willing to be.

Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O LORD, thou knowest it altogether.Psalm 139:2,4

Not a word in my tongue.

In the tongue. Before it is out. He is describing a knowledge that reaches the sentence while it is still forming, before anybody could have judged the delivery.

And the word for it at the end is altogether. Not partly. Not the outside of it. The whole of the thing, including whatever is or is not sitting behind it.

Which means the sentence you say over the bread arrives at God already accompanied by an accurate report of its own condition. He is not being told that it was heartfelt. He knows what it was.

And He has not once returned it.

So I want to turn now and speak this over you, at the head of that table.

You are known altogether and still hosted. Not one day, not when the feeling comes back, not when saying it is a pleasure again. Right now, with the lamps lit and the dishes pushed back, you are the man in verse four, and he is not apologizing in that psalm, he is being comforted by it. That is not my sentiment. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who sets a written line down in a real man at a real table.

Now, why did the accompaniment go?

I do not know the particulars and nobody has told me. But I know the shape of what does it.

Somewhere in the last few years, something asked more of you than you had, and you did it anyway, and you kept the table going and the words going and the door open. And a man who does that for long enough spends the part of himself that supplies the feeling, and the words carry on running because the words are load bearing for other people.

That is not sin and it is not decline. That is the cost of being the one who says it, and there is no dishonor in the bill arriving.

And this next part is settled rather than pending, so hear it. You have a God who has heard every one of those flat sentences and has not marked a single one of them down. The word says He knows it altogether, and altogether includes the year, and it is His Spirit who carries a written line into a real courtyard on a real evening with the plates still out.

The sentence was never true because of how it felt. It is true because of what He is, and it has been keeping your whole street upright on exactly that basis for years.