I Kept Letting People Go Ahead Of Me

There were eleven people in the line and she let four of them past her.

Not obviously. She has done this long enough to be graceful about it. A small step sideways, an open palm, a lift of the eyebrows that says go on, honestly, I am in no rush, and every single one of them took it and thanked her and she meant it every time.

The first one was a woman with a walking stick, and letting her past was simply what you do.

The second was a young man who had been crying since before she got there, quietly, with his shoulders going, and she would have carried him to the front if it had been allowed.

The third was somebody she vaguely knew from the school run whose year, from what she had heard, had been horrendous.

The fourth was nobody in particular, and by then the sideways step had stopped being about the other person.

By the time the line had thinned out, the two people praying at the front were looking tired in the good way people look tired when they have been doing something worth doing, and she found herself standing about eight feet back with her coat over her arm, and then she put her coat on and went and helped stack chairs.

Nobody noticed. Nobody was supposed to notice. She stacked chairs very well.

And in the car, which is where these things happen, she said the sentence out loud that she has never once said to a human being, which was: I believe all of it. I would bet my life on it for anybody else in that room. I just cannot get it to come to me.

I want to be careful with what that is, because she has been calling it a lack of faith for eleven years, and it is not.

A person with no faith does not queue. A person with no faith does not stand for forty minutes in a room where people are being prayed for. A person with no faith does not know the walking stick woman by name or notice the young man's shoulders.

She has enormous faith. It is simply all pointed outwards, like a torch she has never once turned round.

The smallest word Paul ever used

There is a sentence in a letter to some churches in Galatia written by a man who is, by any measure, one of the giants. He had planted churches across an empire. He had argued the faith in front of magistrates. If anybody could talk about all this in the grand plural, it was him.

And in the middle of a densely argued chapter, without warning, he goes small.

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.Galatians 2:20

Count them. Me, me, I, I, me.

The man could have written who loved the world and gave himself for it, which is also true and is written elsewhere and is magnificent. He does not, here. Here, at the hinge of his argument, the giant of the New Testament shrinks the whole gospel down to the size of one person and puts it in the first person singular.

Loved me. Gave himself for me.

That is not Paul being self-absorbed. That is Paul demonstrating the only way the thing can actually be held. It has to come down to a singular pronoun somewhere or it is a beautiful fact about a crowd, and you can admire a fact about a crowd from eight feet back with your coat over your arm indefinitely.

So take this in before anything else. You are the one the singular was written for, and it was written long before that car park; Galatians 2 was set down long before this room, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes what is written and lays it on one person standing still.

Now, I am not going to argue you out of where you are standing, and I want to say that clearly, because you are braced for it.

A case is what the bracing is for. Somebody going at the doubt with reasons until it gives way. And I am not doing that, partly because it would not work, and mostly because the difficulty is not a hole in anybody's reasoning. There is no confusion here. The theology is better understood in this room than in most of that one. If information could have moved it, it would have moved eleven years ago.

What is actually happening is much simpler and much more ordinary. Nobody has ever said it to you in the second person while you were standing still. Everything true you know, you know as a general fact, and you have been very faithfully distributing it, and there has never been a moment where somebody stopped and put the singular on you.

And hear this, because it is settled rather than pending. You have Christ living in you, which is what is written rather than what I hope for you, and His Spirit is the one making it current this afternoon.

And here is the part I want to hand you, because it takes a weight off.

You do not have to produce a moment. That is the other thing that has probably been quietly bruising you: the sense that crossing over is supposed to look like something. A night. A collapse. A story you could tell afterwards with a beginning and an end. Some people have that and it is real and it is lovely.

But there is no rule anywhere that says a thing becomes yours loudly. Paul does not describe a feeling in that verse. He describes a position: Christ lives in me, and the life I now live, I live by faith in the One who loved me.

It is allowed to be quiet. It is allowed to be in a car park. It is allowed to be today, in an ordinary voice, with the heating on, while you feel more or less exactly what you felt at breakfast.