It is about a quarter of a second and it happens somewhere behind your sternum.
Somebody says it from the front, in an entirely ordinary sentence, in a series about something else entirely, and there it is. Not a thought. A movement. And then it is gone and you are following the sentence again and nobody has any idea, including, most of the time, you.
You have known about it for a while. You noticed it properly about three years ago and you have never mentioned it to a single person, because how would you.
And here is what has grown out of it without any decision being made.
You do not read anything on the subject. You have not been to anything with that word in the title in about eleven years. When it comes up in the group you say something warm and general and you steer, and you are good at steering, and nobody has ever noticed.
The doctrine is not the problem. If somebody sat you down you could give a decent account of it and you would agree with most of what you said.
The problem is your body, and your body learned something a long time ago, and it did not consult you and it has not changed its mind.
Grace is the teacher in Titus and that is the whole surprise
There is a passage in Titus that gets used as a moral instruction, and the surprise in it is who is doing the teaching.
For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world.Titus 2:11, 12
Read the subject of the verb. The grace of God is teaching us.
Not the law. Not fear. Not a standard held over anybody. Grace is the instructor in that sentence, and everything that follows about how a person lives is described as what grace teaches, which means it arrives in a person the way a kindness arrives and not the way a rule does.
That is the mechanism, and it is entirely different from the one your body learned.
So take this now, with the flinch still in you. You have been taught a false mechanism and it is not the one in the text. The written word makes grace the teacher of the whole thing, and the Holy Spirit is the instructor at work in you, and there is nothing in that passage that a body would need to flinch at.
Your body is not being unspiritual
Now let me say something to the part of you that has been quietly ashamed of this for three years.
A flinch is not unbelief. It is memory, held somewhere your reasoning cannot reach, and it is doing exactly what it was built to do, which is to protect you from a thing that once hurt.
Something happened. It may have been one sermon. It may have been a season, or a person, or a period in your twenties when that word was used to explain why you were not enough. You may not even be able to name it, and you do not need to name it for this to be true. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it true in you.
Whatever it was, your body filed it under danger, and it has been running that file ever since, faithfully, at a quarter of a second, for years.
You cannot argue it out. You have almost certainly tried, in the way a thoughtful person does, by reminding yourself that the doctrine is fine. The written word settled that, and His Spirit has been carrying it ever since.
Bodies do not take instruction from arguments. They take it from experience, which is why the last part of this article is a physical one and not a mental one.
You are being taught by grace and not by a standard. His word puts grace in the teacher's chair, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the instructing, and He has never once used the method your body is braced against.
The plain hall and the word as it was first used here
In 1895 a man named Phineas Bresee opened a hall near the middle of Los Angeles and made a rule that not one seat in it could be rented, and the doctrine that hall was founded to preach was this one.
Hold those two together, because they were one thing and they have very often come apart.
Free seats and a clean heart came out of the same conviction: that God gives what nobody can buy, and that the people with nothing get it first. In that room this word was announced to people who had been told by every other room in that city that they were not the sort who qualified for anything.
It was good news there. It was the best news in the building.
And in the century since, in some places, it turned into a standard people could fall short of, and that inversion is the thing your body met, and it is a long way downstream of the hall.
The written word puts grace in the teacher's chair, and the Holy Spirit is the one who teaches, and the word your body flinches at is not the word that was preached in that room.
Stop trying to change your mind and start changing the experience.
Your body has one file on this word and it was written a long time ago and nothing has been added to it since, because you have spent eleven years steering away from the subject, which means there has been no new evidence. Scripture says so plainly, and the Holy Spirit does not read it differently on a bad day.
So supply some. Not a course. Not a book with that word in the title, which is going straight at the file.
Go and be near somebody who is plainly holy and plainly warm, and simply be near them, repeatedly, over months. That is the whole method. Not a conversation about the doctrine. Proximity to a counter-example.
Your body takes evidence from rooms and not from arguments, and one warm holy person in a kitchen over six months will do what eleven years of thinking has not.
You are taught by grace. The written word puts it in the teacher's chair, and the Holy Spirit is the one who instructs, so what you are doing is not managing a phobia. It is giving your body something true to learn from.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, standing, in your own kitchen, after the kindness is done. The right to speak them was not earned by feeling right about anything and is not lost by a quarter of a second behind the sternum. It is Christ's own authority, delegated, and because you are in Christ it has been given to you whole, flinch and all. Speak them under not my will, but Thine: He teaches and He heals in His own way and in His own timing, and one reflex is never the measure of what He has settled.
- Flinch, you are a memory and you are not a verdict on that word. The written word puts the grace of God in the teacher's chair and makes it the instructor of the whole thing, and the Holy Spirit teaches by that method and no other.
- Old file, you are open now and you are being written over. Jesus never once taught anybody by holding a standard above them, and His Spirit is the one instructing me, so I stop steering away from this, in the name of Jesus.
- Lord, You made grace the teacher and not the rule, and Your word says it and Your Spirit does it. I do one costly kindness this week, and afterwards I say the word out loud in my own kitchen.
Titus 2:11
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