I Cannot Manufacture It Any More

In the church she grew up in you could tell who was right with God by looking at them, and everybody knew that and nobody would have put it that way.

It was not cynical. Those women were not performing for each other. The joy was real and the tears were real and when the room went up it went up because something actually happened in it, and she was raised inside that and it formed her, and she would defend it to anybody.

But there is a thing that grows alongside it, and it is this: the temperature becomes the evidence. If you are moved, you are with God. If you are not, everybody can see it, including you.

She promised God at nineteen, at the front of that room with everyone around her, that she would never be lukewarm. She had heard a sermon about it and it had frightened her properly and she meant the promise entirely.

She is forty four.

And for about six years she has not been able to produce it. Not would not. Cannot. She stands in that room and the music does what it does and everybody around her goes where they go, and she is standing there with her hands at her sides in a room full of raised ones, being visibly, publicly not moved, and she cannot fake it, because she is not a liar.

So she stopped going. Eighteen months ago. And she told her aunt it was her back.

You may know that room. And you may have left it not because you stopped believing what is preached there, but because you could not any longer produce the thing that room reads as proof, and you would not counterfeit it in front of people who love you.

What Paul actually lists

Now let me take you to the place where Paul says what a person does, and I want you to count the items, because there are two and there is not a third.

He is writing about how anybody comes into this at all, and he wants to make it simple enough that nobody can be shut out by complexity.

That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.Romans 10:9-10

You have the mouth and you have the heart, and no third item was ever added to that list. Romans 10:10 names both and attaches a temperature to neither, and the Holy Spirit is the one who bears witness rather than the room you are standing in.

Mouth and heart

Confess with the mouth. Believe in the heart.

That is the list. Two things, and he repeats them in the next verse in the opposite order so that you cannot miss either.

And now notice the word that is not there. There is no clause about the temperature at which either of them is done. Not: confess with a raised voice. Not: believe with the appropriate heat. And believe in that sentence is not a feeling either; it is a settled reliance, which is why it can be commanded, and feelings cannot be commanded, and Scripture never commands one.

You have both of the things named and neither of them was ever measured by warmth. Romans 10:9-10 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of a letter and stands it in a room where a woman is holding her hands at her sides.

Now let me say something careful about that room, because I am not going to let you leave here thinking I have taken a swipe at your people.

That church is not wrong to be warm. Where God moves in a room, bodies respond, and a congregation that has never wept about anything is missing something real. The heat is not the problem.

The problem is a small piece of arithmetic that nobody in that building ever wrote down: warmth is evidence, therefore no warmth is evidence of nothing. That is a leap, and it is not taught from the front, and it does its damage quietly at the back, in the women standing with their hands down.

You have been failing a test that your own church has never actually set from the pulpit. Scripture names the mouth and the heart and stops, and the Spirit of God is the one who bears witness rather than the room, which is what Paul says elsewhere in the same letter.

What you have that you have not counted

And now the thing I most want to say to you, because you have been counting the wrong column for six years.

You would not fake it. Think about what that costs and what it proves. A woman who cared about looking right would have raised her hands. It is not difficult. Nobody would have questioned it and everybody would have been pleased.

You would not do it. In a room where the whole social weight is on the other side, you stood there with your hands down and let people draw conclusions about you rather than produce something you did not have.

That is not lukewarm. Lukewarm is the woman who does the motions to keep her position. What you have is the opposite of that, and you have been calling it the thing you promised never to be.

You are the least lukewarm person in that room and you have had it upside down for six years. Scripture says it in so many words, and that is exactly what it means that confession is made with the mouth and belief is held in the heart and neither has a temperature attached, and His Spirit has been the witness in you the whole time.