Sunday Sermon, Wednesday Truth

A boy runs past the van with a paper crown on and somebody's mother calls his name across the lot in the voice that means it is the second time.

It is a quarter past eight on a Wednesday in the middle of May and he is sitting sideways in the driver's seat of the church van with the sliding door open, because the last kid's ride is running late and somebody has to wait. The light is going orange along the top of the tree line. Folding tables are leaning against the fence where the men left them.

Two women come out laughing about something a four year old said during the lesson. One of them waves. He waves back and it is a real wave, because he loves these people and they have not done anything.

Sunday morning he preached on freedom.

He preached it out of Galatians and it was the best thing he has done in a year. Not clever. True. He said that Christ has set us free for freedom and that a man does not have to go back and take the yoke up again, and he could feel the room take a breath, and two people stayed afterward in the front pew, and one of them said thank you and could not say anything else.

He was not performing. That is the part worth being clear about. He believed every word of it, and he still does.

This afternoon at four forty, in the twenty minutes between the hospital visit and the sound check, he did the thing.

It had been ninety one days. He keeps the number. He does not write it anywhere, he just carries it, and he could tell you what it was on any given morning going back to February. At four thirty nine it was ninety one. At four forty one it was zero, and the arithmetic of that is what has been sitting in the van with him ever since.

The last car pulls in. He gets up, helps a kid with a backpack that is bigger than she is, says something to the grandfather at the wheel about the rain coming Friday, and slides the door shut.

Then he stands in the empty lot with the keys in his hand.

And you know that lot, though yours is not at a church. You know exactly what it is to have said the true thing on the good day and then to have had the other day, and to be standing somewhere ordinary afterward doing the arithmetic. Ninety one to zero. All of it back to the start, is what the arithmetic says.

Sunday was not a lie and Wednesday was not nothing

Let me hold two things at once here, because everything depends on both of them staying up.

The first is that Sunday was true. What he said about freedom in Christ was not made less true at four forty on Wednesday, any more than a man saying the sun is up makes it night by tripping over a curb. Truth does not run on the speaker. Galatians was not on trial in that twenty minutes.

And the second is that Wednesday was real. I am not going to soften it into a wobble or a bad day or a thing we all struggle with, because you would hear the softening and you would stop trusting me, and rightly. It happened. It cost something. It was against what he actually wants, which is why he is standing in a parking lot instead of driving home.

Both. Not one and then a comfort about the other. Both, in the same hand, which is where honest people live and where a lot of writing about this refuses to go.

You are free in Christ this evening, and the four forty did not repeal it. Galatians 5:1 says Christ set us free for freedom, and it is the Spirit of the Lord in 2 Corinthians 3:17 who is named as the place where that freedom actually is, which means it is anchored in a Person and not in your afternoon.

He cannot deny Himself

Here is the sentence Paul put at the end of a hymn, and it is the strangest and best line in the letter.

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

Read the reason he gives, because it is not the reason we would give. He does not say God stays faithful because He is patient, or because He is kind, or because He knows how hard it is. He says God stays faithful because He cannot do otherwise without ceasing to be Himself. His faithfulness is not a mood He is in about you. It is what He is made of.

Which means it did not adjust at four forty. There was nothing to adjust. A thing that runs on His nature has no dial.

You are held by a faithfulness that has nothing to do with the last four hours, and you were held all the way through them. 2 Timothy 2:13 says He cannot deny Himself, and it is His Spirit who was given as the seal and the deposit in Ephesians 1:13, which is language about something already paid and not something under review.

And notice what the verse does not do. It does not excuse the unbelief it names. Paul writes if we believe not and does not pretend that is fine. He simply says it does not reach God's end of the rope. The honesty and the security are in the same sentence, and neither one is doing the other any favors.

You have not undone anything, and you were not returned to the beginning at four forty one. Philippians 1:6 says the One who began the work carries it to completion, with no clause about restarting, and the Spirit who has been at work in you since long before February did not clock out and clock back in.

The counter is not the work

Now let me say something about that number, gently, because there is one of those in most people.

The number was doing a job. It was a man trying to see something, and there is nothing wrong with a man wanting to see something. But a counter can only measure absence, which means the best it can ever tell you is what has not happened lately, and God has never once described a person that way. Not in a single verse.

So when the counter went to zero, what actually went to zero? The count. Not the ninety one days, which happened, and were real, and are not deleted by anything. Not the man who sat with a couple in March. Not whatever the Holy Spirit was doing under all of it that never showed up as a number at all.

And here is the part that goes in the daylight of this page and not in a footnote. If this thing has hold of you, if four forty has a pattern behind it and the ninety one days took everything you had, put a person into it with you. Not the whole congregation. One counselor who knows this ground. A doctor, because bodies drive more of this than people care to admit. One friend who gets the unedited version and stays anyway. That is not the backup plan for when God does not work. It is a large part of how He works, and He has been arranging people around each other since the second chapter of Genesis. And if tonight has gone somewhere well past regret, and the counting in that van has widened out into whether this church would do better with somebody else in the pulpit and nobody at all in your chair, then call or text 988 while the keys are still in your hand, or whatever crisis line picks up where you are, and stay with a human being until morning.

Micah 7:8 has a man saying do not rejoice over me, my enemy, for when I fall I shall arise, and Romans 8 names the Spirit as the one who intercedes with groanings when a man cannot put it into words: you are lifted by Someone who has done this before, and you were not left in the lot on your own.