What Somebody Told Me About Doubting

You were about thirty and you were standing in a kitchen not unlike this one, and a woman you respected said a sentence to you while she was drying a bowl.

She was not being unkind. That is the thing you have never been able to get round. She was fond of you and she thought she was helping.

She said: a person who doubts should not expect to receive anything.

She had a verse for it. She said the verse straight after, the way people do, and you did not know the verse well enough to know what it was actually about, and she was older than you and she had been walking with God a long time.

And you took that sentence home and you have kept it for over forty years.

It has been the quiet law of your life. Every time you have gone to ask for something and found a wobble in yourself, the sentence has come up first, and you have stopped, or you have asked in a way that does not really commit, which amounts to the same thing.

You have never told anybody it is in there.

Now, before we go any further.

I am not correcting you.

You did nothing wrong at thirty. A younger woman taking a sentence from an older one in a kitchen is not gullible, she is teachable, and the teachable are exactly who a wrong sentence lands hardest on.

I am saying I know which sentence it is. That is all. And I am going to answer it.

No condemnation

Here is the verse, and I want to put it in front of you before anything else, because forty years is a long time to wait for an answer.

There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.Romans 8:1

No condemnation. Not less condemnation. Not condemnation held in reserve pending your steadiness.

And look at the two words in the middle that do the heavy lifting. Therefore now.

Therefore, meaning on the basis of what has just been established, which is the whole long argument Paul has made about a man who does the thing he does not want to do and cannot fix himself.

Now, meaning at this present moment, not at some future point when the account balances.

So let me turn and speak straight at you, in your kitchen with the flour on the table.

You are under no condemnation, at this present moment, on the basis of something already established. Not one day, not once the wobble goes, not when you can ask for something without hesitating. Right now, this morning, with your hands in the dough, you are one of them which are in Christ Jesus, and no clause about doubting appears anywhere in that sentence. That is not my kindness. That is what is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a written line and lays it on a real woman in a real kitchen.

Now the plain thing, and I am going to say it without softening it, because it has needed saying since a kitchen forty years ago.

She was wrong.

Not wicked. Not malicious. She was fond of you and she was drying a bowl and she said a thing she had been told by somebody who had been told it by somebody else. But the sentence was wrong, and it has cost you forty years of half asking, and I am not going to be careful about that in order to be fair to her memory.

Your doubt has never once voided your standing. It is not why the things that did not come did not come. It is not why anything.

That is not a nuance and there is no other side to it.

And hear this, because it is settled and not still open. You have a standing that a sentence in a kitchen has no power over, and it was established before you were thirty. The word says therefore now, which is present tense and settled ground, and it is His Spirit who carries a written line into a real kitchen on a real morning with the bread rising.

Ask like somebody who has nothing hanging over them. That has been the actual position for forty years and nobody told you.