I Thought He Graded On Certainty

You were nineteen and somebody said a sentence in a room and you built your whole spiritual life on it without noticing.

The sentence was about being sure. It was said warmly, by somebody who meant it as encouragement, and it went something like: when you really know, you will not have to wonder.

You were nineteen. You had wondered every day of your life since you were about eleven. And you took that sentence and you made a scale out of it, and you put yourself at the bottom of the scale, and you have been at the bottom of the scale for thirty years.

You have never once described it that way to anybody. If somebody asked, you would say you have a quiet faith.

What is actually happening is that you have been sitting an examination every day since you were nineteen, marking your own paper, against a standard nobody set.

And here is the part I want to say out loud, because you have never said it.

You have been failing. Every day. For thirty years. In your own head, quietly, while doing more for this island than most people who feel sure about everything.

Before we go one step further, let me name what this is.

That is a wound. Not a fault, not a flaw in your character, not a lack of anything.

Somebody handed a nineteen year old a sentence that was not true and did not check what he did with it, and the nineteen year old built a scale, and he has been standing on it ever since with nobody to tell him it was never a real instrument.

He cannot deny Himself

Here is a verse in a letter written to somebody young, and it says something so plain that people spend a lot of energy softening it.

If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself.2 Timothy 2:13

If we believe not.

The verse names the condition without any qualification and without any panic. It is not describing rebellion. The word is about not believing, and Paul puts it there because he knows it happens and he is not going to leave the young man he is writing to without an answer for it.

And the answer is not about the man. It is about God. He abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself.

The reason given for the faithfulness is God's own nature, which means the whole thing rests on a fact about Him that has nothing to do with your reading of your own instrument.

So I want to turn now and speak this over you, up on that lookout with the light coming.

You are held by a faithfulness that does not consult your certainty. Not one day, not once you feel sure, not when the wondering stops. Right now, at nineteen and at forty nine and at every point in between, you are inside the if we believe not clause, and the sentence continues past it in your favor. That is not my kindness. 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 sunrise.

Now the plain thing, and no clause is coming after it.

He does not grade on certainty.

There is no scale. That instrument was never issued by heaven, and thirty years of low marks were recorded by nobody except the man holding the pen.

I am not going to add a sentence about how faith is important, because that is already known in this house, and because that sentence is precisely where the scale gets rebuilt. What I am telling you is that the standard behind thirty years of failing does not exist and never has.

That is not a technicality. It is the whole architecture of that verse.

And this next part is settled rather than pending, so hear it. You have a faithfulness over you that is anchored in what God is rather than in what you can manage. The word says he cannot deny himself, which is a statement about His nature rather than about your performance, and it is His Spirit who carries a written line into a real morning on a real headland.

The wondering is not failing. It never was. You have been marking a paper that was never set.