I Can Explain It And I Am Still Down Here

The chairs are already going up on the stack when she asks it.

You have your bag on your shoulder. The urn is unplugged. Somebody is running a cloth along the long table at the back, and the woman who always waits until the end comes over with her Bible held against her chest like a plate she is afraid of dropping, and she asks how a person can know she still belongs to God on a day when nothing inside her agrees.

And you answer her. You answer her beautifully.

You do not rush it and you do not sweeten it. You take her into Romans 8 and you walk the list with her, the whole long list, death and life and angels and rulers and things present and things to come, and you tell her that Paul is not being poetic there, he is being exhaustive. He is closing every door in the building one at a time so that there is nowhere left in the room for the fear to stand. You tell her that assurance is not a feeling she has to manufacture on a Tuesday. You tell her it rests on what God has finished and not on what she can currently detect.

She cries a little. She holds your hand for a second. She says she needed that, and she means it, and she is right, and not one word of it was flattery.

Then you carry the box of hymnbooks to the cupboard and you turn off the lights and you get into the car.

And you sit there.

Because every word of that was true, and you have not felt the floor under your own feet since the spring before last.

Not doubt. That is the part nobody understands when you have tried to say it out loud. You are not confused about the doctrine. You could sit an examination on it tomorrow morning and pass without opening a book. You could teach it to a room full of pastors. You have taught it to a room full of pastors.

You simply live somewhere the doctrine has not come.

And there is nobody left to ask, because you are the one people ask.

There is a room you teach in and a room you live in

Let me begin where you would least like me to begin, which is by agreeing with you.

What you told that woman was accurate. Not roughly accurate, not close enough for a church hall on a weeknight: accurate. Paul really is shutting doors one after another in that chapter, and assurance really does rest on the finished work rather than on the reading you take off your own chest at ten at night. Nobody on this page is going to tell you that you taught it wrong. There is a version of this message that would say exactly that, and it would be a lie, and it would also be a strange kind of relief, because a wrong answer can at least be corrected.

So here is the first thing, and it is not a rebuke. You have been accurate for two years and unreached for two years, and those are two separate facts that keep getting filed as one. Romans 8:39 does not say depth is a disqualification; it puts depth on the list of things that are not able to separate a person from the love of God, and the Holy Spirit did not hand you that verse as a subject to master. He handed it to you as an address where you already live.

There is a difference between the room a teacher stands in and the room a teacher goes home to, and most of us find out about it slowly. In the first room the words are handled. They are weighed, ordered, illustrated, carried across. In the second room the same words have to land on a tired body and a heart that has gone quiet, and handling is not landing. A midwife who has caught four hundred babies still has to be carried through her own labor by somebody else. Competence has never once made a woman her own rescuer.

Read the sentence again, and read it this time as somebody who is inside it rather than somebody explaining it.

Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.Romans 8:39

Notice what has no power in that line. Depth has none. Depth is named out loud, by name, and then stripped: it is filed with the things that lack the ability, never with the things that qualify. You are not standing outside a promise you have spent two years explaining, because the word does not write an exception for the woman holding the marker, and the Spirit of God does not run one policy for the class and a stricter one for the teacher.

Notice, too, who is doing the not-separating. Nothing on that list is being held off by the strength of the person in the middle of it. Paul does not write that we are able to hold on. He writes that they are not able to separate. The grip under discussion was never yours.

Which brings me to the spring before last, and I am not going to ask you what happened in it. The date is not a statute of limitations and the quiet since is not a verdict. Psalm 34:18 says the Lord is near to the brokenhearted, and near is a word about location rather than a word about mood: you are inside that radius on the nights the radius does not register, and the Holy Spirit is what makes nearness a fact instead of a temperature.

Two years is a long time to be handing bread out at the door of a house where the kitchen has gone cold. It does not make the bread false. Nobody who ate it was cheated. But a woman cannot feed herself by passing a plate, and that is not a flaw in her character, it is the design of the thing: the plate goes out from her, and the meal has to arrive from somewhere else.

So let the order be said plainly, because the order is the whole medicine here. You were reached long before you were ever competent, and nothing since has reversed that sequence. It is written that we love Him because He first loved us, and the Spirit who did the first loving has not switched to a system that waits on your notes, your recall, or your ability to feel the floor.

One plain thing before we go further, and it matters more than anything else on this page. If down there includes thoughts of ending your life, or of quietly not being here, then tell one living human being out loud tonight. A friend, your doctor, a pastor who is not leaning on you. In the United States, call or text 988 and a person answers. Anywhere else, emergency services or your local crisis line will do the same work. That is not a failure of faith, and saying it does not turn a woman into somebody's burden. God puts real rescue into human hands on purpose, and reaching for one of those hands is obedience, not defeat.