Sixty Years Of Calling Him It

He was leaning on the gate telling a neighbor about a decision that had gone right, and he said the sentence he has said a thousand times.

He said: I felt it telling me not to.

And then he stopped. Not dramatically. He did not gasp or go white or drop anything. He just stopped for about two seconds in the middle of his own sentence, and the neighbor did not notice, and he carried on and finished the story and they talked about the weather and the man went home.

But he has been chewing on those two seconds for three weeks.

Because he heard it. For the first time in sixty years he heard the word come out of his own mouth.

It.

He has been a believer since he was seventeen. He has read the Bible at a kitchen table most mornings of his adult life. He has sat on committees, driven people to hospital, buried both his parents in the same churchyard and stood up in that building and read a lesson more times than he could count.

And in all of it, whenever he has talked about the Holy Spirit, and he does talk about Him, and he means every word, what has come out of his mouth is it.

I felt it. It was on me that morning. It has been dealing with me about this.

He is not a man who fusses about words. He would tell you that himself and he would be right. But he cannot get past the fact that he has spent sixty years being led, genuinely and often, by Somebody he has never once given a He to.

And what bothers him is not the grammar. He would not have wasted three weeks on grammar.

What bothers him is the question underneath it: what have I actually thought He was, all this time?

And that is you at your own gate, or you would not still be here on a piece about a pronoun.

Jesus had a pronoun for Him and used it four times in a row

Let me put the plainest thing in front of you first, because you are a plain man and it will do more than an argument.

On the last night, Jesus is telling those men about who is coming after Him. And in the space of about two sentences He says this:

When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.John 16:13

He. He. He. He.

Four in one verse, and the Greek Jesus is being reported in does something a man like you will appreciate: the word for spirit is grammatically neuter, and the pronoun John writes down is not. It should have been it by every ordinary rule of the language, and it is not, and John lets it stand.

That is not a small thing. That is somebody being careful on purpose.

You have been led for sixty years by Someone the Bible refuses to call it. It is written that when the Spirit of truth comes He will guide you into all the truth (John 16:13), and guide is a thing a person does at the front of a walk. The Holy Spirit is the One doing the guiding, and He has been doing it on your ground since you were seventeen.

Now here is the part I most want you to have, and I want to say it before the three weeks turn into three months.

This is not a fault.

You are not being corrected today and nothing has gone wrong between you and Him. It is written that there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1), and a pronoun is not a sin and was never treated as one. The Holy Spirit did not spend sixty years being offended in a farmyard.

You inherited the word. That is all that happened. You were handed a way of speaking by people who were handed it themselves, and the whole of that inheritance was aimed at getting you to take Him seriously, and it worked. You did take Him seriously. You have followed a prompting up a lane in the dark because of it.

A man who has genuinely been led for sixty years has not been treating Him as a force, whatever pronoun he used. Your feet have known better than your mouth.

You have been in company the entire time and the word never once changed who was standing there. It is written that the Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God (Romans 8:16), and Himself is the word the letter uses. The Holy Spirit has been a Person on that ground whether or not anybody in the yard said so out loud.

And now the small thing that is actually available to you, which is not a resolution and not a project.

You are going to sit down and be still for one breath before you speak, because that is what a man does when there is somebody with him. Not to feel anything. Not because there is a technique here, and there is not, and there are no levels, and nobody is grading a sixty year old on his first go.

Just one breath, in a room with two people in it.