Everybody There Had A Story

There were nine of them in a front room and it went round the circle, and she was seventh.

Nobody set it up as a going round. It started because one person said something, and then somebody else had one, and by the fourth person it had become a thing without anybody deciding.

And they were good. That is what she wants said before anything else, because the cheap version of this evening is a young woman deciding everybody was exaggerating, and she does not think they were. She knows these people. Two of them she would trust with anything.

One of them described something that happened in a hospital corridor that she has thought about every day since.

And it got to her, and she said something about how it had been a hard year and she was glad to be there, which was true, and was not what the question was.

And she went home on the bus at about ten and did not put her headphones in, which she always does, and by the time she got off she had arrived somewhere she has not been able to leave since.

Whatever they have, I was not given.

Not: I have not experienced it yet. Not: mine is different. Something much flatter and more settled than that. A quiet certainty, arrived at without drama, that there was a distribution at some point and she was not in it.

She is twenty-six. She has believed since she was fifteen. She could not tell you one moment.

And that is you on your own bus, or you would not still be reading.

Paul asks one question and it settles the whole thing

Here is a man writing to people who had got exactly where you got on that bus, except that somebody had actively pushed them there.

He is furious about it, which is worth noticing, because it tells you how seriously he takes what has been done to them. And in the middle of it he stops arguing and asks them one question.

Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith?Galatians 3:2

He says let me ask you only this, which means he thinks the whole matter turns on it.

And notice the two options he gives them. Not: by having a dramatic experience or by not having one. He is not asking about the manner of receiving at all. He offers exactly two mechanisms, and one of them is doing enough and the other one is believing what you heard.

You received Him by hearing with faith, and there was no second mechanism anywhere in the sentence. It is written, did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith (Galatians 3:2). The Holy Spirit is received by belief, and Paul asks the question as though the answer were too obvious to argue about.

Now the evening itself, because I am not going to take it off those people.

You were right that they were not exaggerating, and their accounts do not need to be smaller for you to be included. It is written that there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone (1 Corinthians 12:6). The Holy Spirit gave those things to those people, and none of it was a distribution you were absent from.

And the woman with the hospital corridor. Leave it exactly as it is. It happened. Be glad.

Here is what went wrong on that bus, and it is a single step and it is very easy to miss.

You heard nine accounts of what He has done in people and read them as evidence of who has Him. Those are different claims, and the second one does not follow from the first, and nobody in that room said it, and you supplied it yourself in the dark on the way home.

You are not looking at an entry list and you were never outside one. It is written that in Him you also, when you heard the word of truth and believed in Him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit (Ephesians 1:13), and you also is Paul deliberately including the people who felt like an afterthought. The Holy Spirit was given at belief and not at the moment somebody got a story.

And one more, because you are twenty-six and this matters more than it will in twenty years.

You are not required to have a moment you can name. It is written that the wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes (John 3:8), and Jesus says that specifically about people born of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is described by Christ Himself as arriving in a way that cannot be traced.