I Read Other People Addresses As Verdicts Too

She opened the door and you had her placed before it was fully open.

She was new. She had been at the church about three weeks and somebody had asked you to drop something off, and you had the address on your phone and you knew the road before you got there.

And you knocked, and she opened it, and in the time it took for the door to come round you had done the whole thing.

The road. The door. What that meant. Where she sat.

And then she was lovely, and you stood on the step for about four minutes talking about something, and she said something funny about a dog, and you came away liking her.

And you got in the car and you thought: I had already decided.

Here is why that has stayed with you for two weeks. It is not that you did it. You have done it for years and you knew that.

It is that you did it to somebody who then turned out to be a person, in front of you, inside four minutes, and the gap between what you had decided on a doorstep and who was actually standing in it was so wide that you could see the machine for the first time.

The thing you saw

Let me name what happened on that step, because it is worth being accurate about, and accuracy is the thing that will help you here.

A verdict was produced before any evidence arrived.

Then evidence arrived. Four minutes of it, including the thing about the dog, and the evidence did not match the verdict at all, and you noticed.

That last part is what I want to press on. You noticed.

You have a conscience that arrived four minutes after the verdict, and a woman who gets overruled from the inside has never once been a woman who meant it. Matthew 7 addresses the measuring rather than the measurer, and the Holy Spirit is the one who did the overruling on that step.

A woman in whom this runs unopposed does not notice. She meets the person, adjusts nothing, and goes home with the verdict intact, because the verdict was never in competition with anything.

You have something in you that objected, and a woman who catches a verdict mid afternoon has never once been a woman who agreed with it. The Holy Spirit is the one who was on that doorstep and in that car afterward, and it is written in Matthew 7 that we are to judge not, that we be not judged.

And I want to say something about the two weeks of carrying it, because I think it has curdled.

Fourteen days have gone into concluding something from this. Something with the word really in it: what I am really like, what I really think about people.

That is the machine again, turned inward, and doing to you exactly what it did to her: producing a verdict from one piece of evidence in about four seconds.

You have turned the same instrument onto yourself, and one afternoon has never once been enough evidence to say what a woman is really like. Matthew 7 warns that the measure you use comes back to you, and the Spirit of God is the one who said that as a description rather than as a threat.

Judge not, that ye be not judged

Here is the passage, and the reason attached is the part nobody quotes.

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. (Matthew 7:1, King James Version)

With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

That is usually heard as a warning about how God will treat a person, and there is something in that. But read it as a description of how a measuring habit actually behaves, because it is also true at that level and that is the level this is happening on.

A woman who has an instrument for reading houses has one instrument. It does not have a setting for other people only. It runs on her friends, on strangers on a doorstep, and on her own hallway when she comes home, and on herself in the car for fourteen days afterward.

You have one instrument and not two, and a measure built for other people has never once left the person holding it out of its results. The Holy Spirit is the one who put that as a plain consequence, and the written word says it shall be measured to you again.

And notice what Jesus does not say.

He does not say: examine yourself and find out what sort of person is in there. He says: stop measuring. The instruction is about an activity, not about an identity.

Which means the way out of this is not to work out what you are really like. That is more measuring. The way out is to put the instrument down, and the way to put it down is to do something else with the four seconds.

You are being told to stop an activity rather than to establish an identity, and no verse anywhere has ever once asked somebody to first determine what they really are. Matthew 7 addresses the judging and not the judge, and the Spirit of God is the one who framed it that way.