I Cry At Everybody Else's

Deborah has been to nineteen baptisms since her own and she has cried at every single one of them.

She keeps a rough count. Not on purpose, it just accumulates. Her sister's. Two of her sister's children. A woman from work who invited half the office and only Deborah came. A man of about seventy who nobody expected. Her own son, four years ago, and she had to leave the row and stand at the back because she could not get herself under control.

Nineteen. Nineteen for nineteen.

And at hers, in 2003, she felt absolutely nothing.

She has never been able to say that in a room. It sounds ungrateful, and it sounds like a complaint about people who were nothing but good to her, and it sounds, most of all, like an admission she is not willing to make out loud.

Because here is what she concluded, privately, somewhere around 2009, and she has never revisited it since.

If it is real, it does something. It did something in all nineteen of them, and I was standing right there, so I know what real looks like. It did not do it in me. Therefore.

She never finishes that sentence, not even in her own head. She just leaves the therefore sitting there and moves on with her day, and it has been sitting there for seventeen years.

You may have a therefore of your own.

Maybe yours is about a baptism, or a prayer, or an altar, or a night in a room where it happened for everybody but you. And you drew a conclusion once, quietly, without telling anybody, and then you built the rest of your life on top of it without ever going back to check whether it was load-bearing.

Look at what you have made the evidence

Let me get right to the underneath of it, because I do not think you need a long walk round.

You have made the tears the evidence.

Not on purpose. Nobody sat you down and taught you that. But nineteen times you have watched a thing happen in a room and felt it move through you, and every single one of those has been quietly filed as data, and the data all points one way.

Now hear what Paul says about how the whole of this operates.

For we walk by faith, not by sight.2 Corinthians 5:7

That is a short sentence about a very large thing.

Sight there is not only eyes. It is everything available to be perceived. The whole visible, feelable, verifiable department. Paul says the walking does not run on that, and he is not saying it to people who had none of it. He is saying it to a church that had a great deal of it, some of them rather too much.

And what you felt in 2003 was never the thing holding you up. The written word puts the walking on faith and specifically not on what can be perceived, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman who has been reading nineteen rooms as a verdict on one.

And you are not required to produce evidence of any kind. The word says walk by faith and never once attaches a test to it, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit, which is a thing He does rather than a thing you demonstrate.

The tears are good, and they are not a meter

I want to say something careful here, because there is a cheap version of this message that says feelings do not matter, and that is not true and it is not what I am saying.

The nineteen were real. What moved in you at your son's, when you had to stand at the back, was real, and it was not manufactured and it was not silly. God made you a person who can be moved, and that is not a defect and it is not something to be corrected.

The tears are good. They are just not a meter.

A meter tells you how much of something is present. Your tears at the back of that room told you something true about your son, about a mother, about twenty-two years of praying, and about a God who was in it. They did not measure the amount of God in the building, and they certainly do not measure Him backwards across seventeen years into a morning in 2003.

And your own morning was not less attended because you were dry-eyed at it. The word says he is faithful that promised, and it puts the faithfulness on His side of the sentence, and the Spirit is the one who makes that steady in a woman who has been running a comparison since she was in her thirties.

The therefore, said out loud

Now let us finish that sentence, because leaving it unfinished is what has let it live so long.

The sentence you have never completed is: therefore mine did not take.

Say it out loud once and look at it. It has an assumption in it that has never been examined, which is that the water was doing something to your nervous system and the nervous system was the receipt.

But watch what the baptism is described as. Buried with Him. Raised with Him. Both of those are things done to you by somebody else. Neither one is a sensation. A person can be buried without feeling buried, which is in fact the ordinary case.

And you were buried with Him and raised with Him whether or not you noticed. The word puts both verbs in the passive with Him as the actor, and the Spirit is the one who lets that land in somebody who has been treating her own reaction as the verification.

And nothing about you is under review. The word says there is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that, which nobody argues themselves into after seventeen years of quiet filing.