You Have Started Becoming Him

Your nephew said something about a thing he had done, at your table, on a Sunday, and it was not a big thing and it was not even a wrong thing exactly, and you answered him.

And you heard it.

Not afterwards. In the moment, with the sentence still halfway out of your mouth, you heard whose voice it was in, and you finished the sentence anyway because there is no way to stop in the middle of one, and then you passed something down the table.

Nobody else noticed. He did not notice; he answered normally and the conversation moved.

You have not been able to think about anything else for eleven days.

Because you were nineteen years old when you decided, with a certainty you have rarely had about anything since, that you would never speak to a young person the way that man spoke to you. You held it. Twenty-six years, four children, and about a hundred young people through the program you run.

And on Sunday it came up out of you, whole, in his exact cadence, and it fitted your mouth perfectly.

Here is what has been sitting on you since. If it was in there after twenty-six years of watching for it, then it is not something you decided about at nineteen. It is something you are carrying.

The prophecy Matthew picks to describe Him is about handling

There is a moment where Matthew stops the narrative to explain who Jesus is by quoting Isaiah, and of all the things he could have chosen, he chooses a line about how a damaged thing gets handled.

A bruised reed shall he not break, and smoking flax shall he not quench, till he send forth judgment unto victory.Matthew 12:20

A bruised reed shall he not break.

A bruised reed is already damaged and is worth nothing and would take no effort at all to finish. Smoking flax is a wick that has gone out and is producing nothing but smoke, and the obvious thing to do with it is pinch it.

And the summary Matthew reaches for, to tell you what this man is like, is that He does neither.

Notice that this is not about being gentle with the strong. It is specifically about what happens in His hands to the thing that is already damaged and is currently useless.

So take this now, eleven days on. You are being formed toward that and not toward the other thing. The written word chooses the handling of a bruised reed as the summary of Christ's own character, and the Holy Spirit is the one who works that likeness into a person, and the cadence that came out of you on Sunday is not the direction of travel.

Name it and do not prosecute yourself

Now let me handle you the way that verse says you get handled, because you have been doing the opposite for eleven days.

You have been treating Sunday as a revelation about your true self. Something like: this is what I actually am, and twenty-six years of the other thing was a performance.

That is not what happened.

What happened is that you were formed by somebody before you were old enough to have a say in it, and that formation lives in a place decisions do not reach, and it comes out under specific conditions, and one of those conditions found you on a Sunday. The written word settled that, and His Spirit has been carrying it ever since.

Twenty-six years of it not coming out is not a performance. It is twenty-six years of it not coming out, and that is real, and about a hundred young people can testify to it whether they know it or not.

And here is the thing you have not let yourself notice in eleven days. You heard it. In the moment. Halfway through the sentence. Scripture says so plainly, and the Holy Spirit does not read it differently on a bad day.

He never heard it. Not once, in the whole of his life, as far as anybody could tell.

That gap is the entire distance you have traveled, and it is enormous, and you have spent eleven days unable to see it because you have been standing too close.

You are a bruised reed in the hands of somebody who does not break them. His word chooses that as the summary of His character, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the forming.

The founding room and the word it used

In 1895 a man named Phineas Bresee opened a hall near the middle of Los Angeles and would not let anybody rent a seat, and the doctrine that hall was founded to preach was a whole heart given to God.

The distinctive thing about it, in its own century, was not severity. It was the opposite.

That word was preached in that hall to people who had been handled roughly by every institution they had ever met, and the promise in it was that God does the work on the inside, as a gift, in people who cannot do it themselves.

Whatever it later became in some quarters, and something did happen to it in some quarters, it started as the gentlest thing in that neighborhood.

And the reason that matters on an eleventh day is this: you have inherited a manner from a man who was probably taught severity by somebody who was taught it by somebody else, four or five generations back, and at some point up that line there was a plain hall with free seats in it and none of this in it at all.

The written word puts a bruised reed in unbreaking hands, and the Holy Spirit is the one who forms that.