Twenty-Six Years Without It

Twenty-six years in September and you do not mark it, and you have never once told anybody the date.

You know exactly why you stopped. You were twenty-four and you were standing in a doorway looking at a room, and there was a child in that room who was not looking back at you, and you have never needed anybody to explain to you what you were looking at.

You stopped. Fully. There was no relapse and there was no near miss and there has never been a difficult Christmas, and you would tell anybody who asked that this is not a virtue, it is a mercy, and that you are not the reason it held.

So for twenty-six years you have been the man who does not.

That is what you are, in that whole community. Not unkindly. Nobody says it as a slight. But if somebody who did not know you asked about you, that is the second sentence they would get, and everybody in that place has assumed for a quarter of a century that being the man who does not is a complete description of a life.

And here is what happened in March, which is why you have this open.

A young man came to your gate. Twenty-two, maybe. Not from your family. He had heard, from somebody, and he stood there and could not get a sentence out, and eventually he said something like: how do you stop.

And you talked to him for two hours on that step and something moved in you that has not moved in years.

And then he left, and you stood there, and the thought that came was: nobody has ever once asked me what any of this was for.

An angel gives a set-apart man one verb and it is not a negative

There is a scene where an angel comes to a woman and tells her about the son she is going to have, and the instructions are famous for what the boy must not touch, and almost nobody reads the last clause.

For the child shall be a Nazarite unto God from the womb: and he shall begin to deliver Israel out of the hand of the Philistines.Judges 13:5

There is a list. The list is real and it is in the verses around it.

But look at the shape of the sentence. The abstaining is the setting apart, and the setting apart has a purpose clause bolted to the end of it, and the purpose is a verb: he shall begin to deliver.

Begin. Not complete. Begin, which is a word about a first move in something that other people will carry on, and it is worth noticing that God says so in advance rather than overselling the boy's life.

So take this now, twenty-six years in. You were set apart toward a deliverance and not merely away from a bottle. The written word puts a verb at the end of the abstaining, and the Holy Spirit is the one who did the setting apart, and a quarter of a century of not touching a thing has never been the whole of what He had in mind.

The not doing is real and it is not a life

Now let me be careful, because there is a way of saying this that would sound as though the twenty-six years were somehow insufficient, and I am not saying that and I will not have you hearing it.

The twenty-six years are the reason there are people alive in your family who would not otherwise be. There is a woman in her thirties who had a father through her whole childhood, and there is a marriage still standing, and none of that is background. It is the main event.

And it is also not the whole assignment, and the proof of that arrived at your gate in March and could not get a sentence out.

Here is the thing you have to see, and the written word says it and the Holy Spirit has been saying it over you. You have been treating the twenty-six years as the achievement. Everybody around you has treated it that way too, and they have been generous about it, and the generosity has quietly fixed the definition in place.

But in the way God arranges these things, the twenty-six years are the qualification. That boy did not come to your gate because you are wise. He came because you are the man who does not, and because that means you are the only man within forty miles who is safe to say the sentence to.

You are set apart toward a deliverance. His word puts the verb at the end and the Holy Spirit sent a young man to your gate in March, and a clean record is not a resting place, it is a door somebody else has to walk through.

What was preached in a plain hall

There was a hall in Los Angeles in 1895 where a man named Phineas Bresee refused to let anybody rent a seat, and one of the things preached in that plain room was being wholly set apart to God.

The handing on of that doctrine has often gone wrong in exactly the way it has gone wrong around you: it becomes an inventory of what a person no longer touches, and after enough years that inventory is the whole public account of a life.

It did not work like that in that room, for a very ordinary reason. The hall ran missions in the streets outside its own door, and the people who came in off those streets having stopped something were the ones sent straight back out, because they were the only ones who knew the way in.

Set apart there meant available, and it meant available specifically to the people you had come out from among.

The written word puts a beginning of deliverance on the end of the Nazarite sentence, and the Holy Spirit has been keeping you twenty-six years for something that has now started arriving at your gate.