I Stopped Saying The Date Out Loud

You said March.

You said it at your brother's table with eleven people there, and you said it the way you say a thing you have settled in yourself, which is quietly and without any lift at the end.

You said, it will be sorted by March.

And people were glad. Somebody said something about God being faithful and everybody agreed and the plates went round and it was a good evening.

March came. Then April.

Nobody has ever brought it up. Not one of those eleven people has said a word about it in two years, and you know exactly why they have not, and their kindness has been harder to carry than a question would have been.

And you have not named a month out loud since.

Not once. Not about anything. If somebody asks you when, you say we will see, or in the Lord's time, or something else that is perfectly true and is also a locked door.

Let me get this out of the way first.

I am not telling you off.

You did not sin at that table. Believing God for something and saying it out loud in front of your family is not presumption, it is what a man is supposed to do, and I am not going to sit here and tell you that you were foolish. And I am certainly not going to tell you that the thing did not come because you named a month.

I am saying I know what it has cost you to stop naming them. That is all.

An anchor is not a calendar

Here is a picture I want to put in front of you, and I want you to look at what is holding what.

Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast, and which entereth into that within the veil.Hebrews 6:19

An anchor is not a prediction. It does not tell a boat when it will arrive anywhere and it does not tell it what the weather is going to do.

An anchor tells you one thing: how far you can drift. That is its whole job. The boat still moves. The boat moves quite a lot on a bad night. And the anchor is what makes the movement bounded rather than endless.

And look at where the writer says this one is fixed. Not on the deck, and not on the seabed either. It goes into that within the veil, into the holiest place, fastened at the far end to something inside the temple rather than to anything in the weather.

So let me turn and say it straight to you, standing wherever you are standing.

You are anchored inside the veil, and you were the whole of that March. Not one day, not when something finally moves, not when you feel able to say a month again. Right now, on an ordinary Tuesday two years on, you are fastened to the far end of a rope that goes somewhere the weather cannot reach. That is not my encouragement. That is what is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries a written line down onto a real man on a real afternoon.

Now, why did the months stop?

Because you fastened your hope to the calendar, and I want to say clearly that you did that in good faith, and most of the people who taught you would have applauded it.

But a date is on the deck. It is in the weather. And when March went past, the thing your hope was tied to went past with it, and what you did afterwards was sensible: you stopped tying it to anything at all, because tying it to something was what had hurt.

That is not unbelief. That is a man who got hurt in a specific way and stopped doing the specific thing.

And take this in, because it is already decided rather than pending. You have an anchor that was never on the calendar and did not go past in March. The word says sure and stedfast, which are two words about the fastening rather than about the schedule, and it is His Spirit who carries a written promise into a real chest on a real farm on an ordinary afternoon.

You are allowed to want it in March again. You are not obliged to. Neither one of those decides whether you are held.