Not One Word to Him

The corridor lights are still on the night setting, which is the color of weak tea, and the day shift comes in the way the day shift always comes in.

Wet hair. Coats over one arm. Somebody's keys going down on the counter too hard. Three conversations at once about the road shut at the roundabout. Handover takes eleven minutes and it is mostly nothing: room four slept, the delivery is in the wrong cupboard, the printer is doing it again.

And room nine was awake at three, asking about heaven again, and the man in the gray fleece who has done nights here for four years went and sat on the end of the bed and told her.

He told her well. He always tells her well. He said the thing about the many rooms, and the thing about Jesus going on ahead to get it ready, and he did not make it sound like a leaflet, and by ten past four she was asleep with the lamp off and the door left open the way she likes it. One of the day staff pulls her lanyard over her head and says he ought to be writing this down somewhere. She means it kindly. He laughs. It is even true. And none of that is the part that catches him.

You know which part it is. You have been carrying it a while.

It happens outside, at the stop, in the first proper light, with your bag between your feet and nobody within fifty yards of you. You go to pray, the way you have gone to pray for years, and for once you actually hear what comes out of your own mouth.

He is faithful. He knows what He is doing. He has never let me down yet.

All of it true. Every single word of it true. And every single word of it in the third person, spoken out into a cold morning, about a Man who was standing right there.

What Paul still wanted, after everything he knew

Let me be careful with you here, because I think you have already worked out how to say this about yourself in the worst way available. This rests on Scripture in Philippians 3:10, and on the Holy Spirit who makes what is written a living thing.

The sentence in your head goes something like: I am all head and no heart. Or: I have talked my way right around Him for twenty years and never once got in. Or the short one, the one that arrives at the end of a night like that one, which is simply that you are a fraud with a good memory. Scripture already said it in Philippians 3:10, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the work, not the sentence.

I want that sentence off you before we go a step further, because it is not true, and because it is doing real damage in a place where you cannot watch it work.

Start with what is actually on the page, from the man who knew more about Christ than anyone in his generation. Paul had the training, the languages, the whole of the Scriptures held in his head. He is the last man on earth anybody would accuse of knowing too much. And at the end of his life, writing from a prison cell, this is what he still wanted.

That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings.Philippians 3:10

Read the tense of it. Not that I may know about Him. Not that I may get better at explaining Him. That I may know Him, present and ongoing and unfinished, from a man with nothing left to learn about the subject.

Two things fall out of that, and they both land on you this morning.

The first is that the gap you have been standing in is not a symptom of failure. It is the ordinary ache of every person who has ever loved Him, and Paul put his own name to it in writing. Knowing a person is not a higher mark on the same test. It is a different verb entirely. You have been failing an exam that was never set. None of that is mine to declare on my own. Scripture said it first in Philippians 3:10, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings it the distance.

The second is that Paul never once tells you to know less. Look at what he says a few lines earlier: he counts everything else loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord. The knowledge is not the trouble. He calls it excellent. He calls it worth every single thing he laid down to have it.

So nobody here is going to tell you that what you know is what stands between you and God. That is a cheap sermon and it is not in the text. What is in the text is a Person who has been on the other side of every true sentence you have ever said about Him, waiting for one of them to be aimed at Him. Scripture put that in writing long before you read it here, in Philippians 3:10, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes written words land.

And here is the part that changes the arithmetic completely.

You have been assuming that knowing Him is a thing you have to get good enough at. That there is a threshold somewhere, and you are on the wrong side of it, and everybody else crossed it years ago. So watch what Paul does in the middle of a sentence when he writes to the Galatians. He says: now that you have known God. Then he stops himself and corrects it in the same breath, and says: or rather, are known of God. I have no authority to say that by myself. Scripture carries it in Philippians 3:10, and the Holy Spirit carries it to you.

He fixes his own sentence, because he has just remembered which way round it goes.

He says it plainly in another letter too: if any man love God, the same is known of Him.

You were known before you were ever informed. Every night you sat on the end of somebody's bed and got it right, He was in that room, knowing you, while you described Him to a woman who could not sleep. Nothing you learned was wasted, and nothing you learned was the point. All of it was pointing at a Person, and He has known your name the whole time you were getting His details right. That is Scripture's sentence and not mine, Philippians 3:10, and it is the Holy Spirit and not this page who makes it true where you are.

The distance you have been measuring is not between you and God. It is between two pronouns, and it is one small word wide. Scripture stands under that in Philippians 3:10, and the Holy Spirit does the part no sentence can do.