The Drive Home From Her House

It is about eleven minutes from her road to yours, and you have never once used those eleven minutes to think about anything.

Tonight you did.

You had been sitting in her kitchen for two hours. She had said the thing she has been saying for months, the one where her voice goes flat and she looks at the table, and at some point you reached over and put your hand on hers and you prayed.

And you meant it.

That is what I want you to notice first, because you have spent the whole drive being hard on yourself and you have skated straight past the good thing. You did not manage a polite prayer. You believed it. You believed it with your whole chest, in her kitchen, out loud, and you were not performing and you were not talking yourself into it. You would have stood in front of anybody at all and said the whole of it again.

You told her that God sees her. That He has not forgotten a single day of this. That He is going to be good to her in this, and that she is not going to be left in it.

And she cried, and you sat there a while longer, and then you got your coat.

And then you got in the car.

And somewhere around the second roundabout, with the radio off, you thought about your own situation for the first time in two hours.

And there was just nothing there.

Not despair. It would be easier if it were despair. It was flatter than that, and quieter, and it went something like: yes, well. That is different.

You did not decide it. There was no argument, no crisis, no moment where you weighed it up and concluded that God was not going to do it for you. You simply arrived at the roundabout and the faith was not in the car.

You have been sitting outside your own house with the engine off for about six minutes now.

And here is the thing I want to say straight away, before anything else, because I think you are braced for it.

I am not catching you out.

This is not a piece about inconsistency. I have not spotted anything about you that you have not known for years, and I am not going to hold it up and turn it round in the light. There is nothing to be embarrassed about in front of me, and there is nothing to be embarrassed about in front of God, who has watched you do this for a long time and has never once been irritated by it.

I am just saying that I see it. That is all.

What He did not withhold

I am not going to argue you into this. If argument worked, you would have argued yourself into it years ago, because nobody in this car is stupid, and the case has almost certainly been made at three in the morning already and lost anyway.

So instead I want to put one sentence in front of you and let you look at it.

He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?Romans 8:32

Read the middle of it. For us all.

Not for the ones who can believe it about themselves. Not for the ones with a steady week. For all, which is a word with no gate in it, and that word has never once been hard to apply to another human being.

So take this in before anything else. You are inside the word all, and you were inside it before you got in the car tonight; Romans 8 was written long before her kitchen, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a written line and sets it down in a real chest at half past ten.

And then look at the shape of the argument, because it does not run the way we expect.

It does not say: God gave you a small thing, so trust Him for a bigger one. It runs the other way round. It starts at the most expensive thing that has ever happened, the one He has already done, and it reasons downhill from there. If He did not hold that back, what exactly is He holding back now?

Now here is what I actually want to say to you tonight, and I want it said kindly, because there is nothing to be ashamed of in it.

You do not have a faith problem.

You have a faith that works. It worked beautifully in her kitchen at half past eight. It is not weak and it is not broken and it does not need repairing, and the whole time the word unbeliever has been used in here, something most people would love to have has been sitting in this car. That is what is written about the ones the promise was made to, and His Spirit is the one who has been carrying it.

There is just one name it will not stretch to.

And hear this, because it is finished and not still being worked out. You have a working faith and it was working forty minutes ago. That is not my encouragement to you; it is what is written about who the promise was made to, and it is His Spirit who was moving in that kitchen and is in this car now.

And that is not sin, and it is not weakness, and it is not a phase you should have got past by now. Most of the time it is what happens to a person who has done a great deal of the carrying. You are the one who prays for other people. You have been the strong one in a lot of rooms. And somewhere along the way, without deciding it, you started operating as though grace was something you distributed rather than something you were also standing in.

Beloved, it is written that He did not spare His own Son, and He did not spare Him for us all, and His Spirit is the one who takes that line off a page and lays it on a person.

You were in that sentence when it was written. You did not get added later on merit and you cannot get taken out on a bad night.