They Told Me To Have Faith About It

It was a conference, and it was three years ago, and you have not talked about it since.

The man was warm. He was not a caricature and he was not obviously anything. He talked for a while about a house his own family had been believing for, and then he said a sentence about a seed, and then there was a moment, and you went.

You gave what you had been putting away that year. Not all of it. A specific amount that you decided in about eleven seconds while standing up, and you remember the exact figure and you have never said it out loud to anybody.

And you went home and you believed. Properly. You told God what you were standing on, you wrote the date in the front of your Bible, you thanked Him for it in advance the way you had been taught to, and for about six months you told your husband it was going to be all right.

And nothing happened. Which is not the sentence I mean.

What I mean is that the money did not come, and the house did not come, and you did the thing everybody in that position does, which is to look for the fault, and the only place available to look was inside yourself.

And you found something, because a person looking for a fault in themselves always finds one.

You decided you had not really believed.

The bill with God's name on it

Let me say the hard thing straight out, because it has been carried alone for three years and it belongs on somebody else.

Somebody sold you something.

I am not going to tell you what was in that man's heart, because I do not know and neither does anybody else. But I can tell you exactly what the transaction did: it attached a promise from God to an act you performed, and when the promise did not arrive, there was nowhere for the failure to go except to you.

That is the design of it. It never fails from the seller's side. Either it works, and the system is proved, or it does not, and the person who gave has a defect.

You have been standing under a weight that was engineered to land on you, and the collapse of somebody else's mechanism has never once been evidence about your faith. The Holy Spirit is the one who kept that admission in the book without correcting it, and it is written in Psalm 73 that a man says my feet were almost gone, my steps had well nigh slipped.

And I want to be precise about the injury, because it is not mainly the money.

The money is gone and it was a real amount and I am not going to be glib about that. But you would have got over the money. What you have not got over is that for three years the only available explanation for what happened has been a fault in you, and you have been living with a verdict that nobody ever issued and that is not true.

You were never the failure point in a thing that never fails from the other end, and three years of looking inward has never once found anything that was actually there. Psalm 73 has a man saying plainly that he nearly slipped, and the Spirit of God is the one who let him say it before He said anything else.

My feet were almost gone

Here is the verse, and I want you to see who is speaking.

But as for me, my feet were almost gone; my steps had well nigh slipped. For I was envious at the foolish, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. (Psalm 73:2, King James Version)

This is a temple musician. A man whose job was leading worship, admitting in writing that he nearly went over.

And what nearly took him out was watching the arithmetic not work. He looked at people who had no business prospering and saw them prosper, and he looked at his own life, and the sum did not come out, and he says it almost finished him.

That is a man whose faith was damaged by an accounting problem, and the Spirit of God put his account in the songbook.

You are in a psalm rather than outside one, and having your footing go over an arithmetic that would not come out has never once put you outside the people of God. The Holy Spirit is the one who thought that belonged in a book of songs, and the written word keeps a worship leader's near collapse on the page in his own words.

And notice where the psalm turns, because it is not where people expect.

It does not turn when he gets an explanation. It turns in verse seventeen, when he goes into the sanctuary of God, and what changes is not his circumstances and not his understanding of the arithmetic. What changes is that he is in the presence of God with the question still unanswered.

He never gets the sum to work. He gets God.

You are permitted to come back in with the arithmetic still broken, and no unanswered question of yours has ever once been the thing keeping you out. Psalm 73 turns in a sanctuary rather than at an explanation, and the Spirit of God is the one who has been waiting for you rather than for your answer.