No Lightning, No Platform

You have a picture of how it is supposed to go and you have never described it to anybody, because saying it out loud would make it sound like something you would not want to be caught wanting.

In the picture there is a room. There is a moment. Something happens that you could not have produced yourself and would not be able to explain afterwards, and when it is over you are on the other side of a line, and you know it, and other people can tell.

You have been waiting for that since you were about twenty six.

Not passively. You have gone to everything. You have stood in the front for things you did not enjoy standing in the front for. If somebody said there was a night on, you would go.

And nothing like the picture has ever happened.

Plenty of other things have happened. Some of them were genuinely good and two of them changed how you live. But none of them arrived with lightning, and none of them put you visibly on the other side of a line, and so you have filed all of them under encouraging rather than under it.

Let me say something first.

I am not correcting you.

There is nothing greedy about wanting a moment. Wanting God to do something unmistakable is not vanity, and half the people who would tell you it is have never wanted anything that much.

I am saying I know what you have been waiting for. That is all.

Yea, and amen

Here is a verse that explains where the promises actually get concluded.

For all the promises of God in him are yea, and in him Amen, unto the glory of God by us.2 Corinthians 1:20

In him are yea. God's side is settled. Whatever the promise is, He has already said yes to it, and Paul says all of them, which is not a word with exceptions in it.

And in him Amen. And this is where it gets interesting, because amen is a word said by people. It is the word a congregation says. It is the closing of a transaction, said out loud by the ones receiving it.

So the picture in that sentence is not lightning. It is a yes that was said before you got there and an amen that is yours to say, and the location of both of them is in him rather than in a room or a night or a moment.

So here it is, said directly to you, in that side room with the biscuits going round.

You have a yes already spoken over the whole of it. Not one day, not once the room happens, not when something arrives that you could not explain. Right now, on a Tuesday afternoon with four people laughing about something, you are inside a verse where God's half is finished and the remaining word belongs to you. That is not my consolation. That is what is written, and it is His Spirit who takes a written line and lands it on a real woman in a real room.

Now, about the picture.

I am not going to tell you those moments do not happen. They do. I have seen some and so have you.

What I want to say is that the picture has been functioning as a gate, and it was never a gate. It has been sitting between you and a thing that was already yours, and it has been doing that since somewhere around twenty six, and nobody put it there on purpose.

The amen in that verse is not a reward for a spectacular experience. It is a word said by ordinary people at the end of a promise they have understood is theirs, usually in a normal room, usually without anything visible happening at all.

And hear this, because it is settled rather than pending. You have the yes, and the yes did not wait on a moment. The word says all the promises of God in him are yea, which is a finished side rather than a pending one, and it is His Spirit who carries a written line into a real afternoon on a real ordinary day.

You are allowed to say amen on a Tuesday. Nothing has to happen in the room for that word to be the real thing.