The Same Argument For Nineteen Years

It happened again on Sunday and it took about four minutes, which he thinks might be the worst part.

Four minutes from the first remark to the point where he heard his own voice doing the thing it does. Not shouting. He does not shout. Something colder and more precise than shouting, which he has been doing since he was about twenty-two and which he could describe to you in detail because he has heard it so many times.

His brother-in-law. Same subject. Nineteen years.

He is not going to explain the subject, partly because it is nobody's business and partly because after nineteen years the subject is not really the subject.

And afterwards he did what he always does, which is drive home not saying much, and then at about eleven o'clock, in the kitchen with everybody in bed, he had the thought he has had probably two hundred times.

Nineteen years.

He has prayed about this. Properly, and for years, not in a resigned way. He has apologized twice, which was not easy. He has genuinely wanted it to be different and he has genuinely asked.

And on Sunday it took four minutes.

And what has hardened in him, over about the last five of those nineteen years, is not anger at his brother-in-law. It is a settled and unspoken verdict on himself, which is that nothing in him has actually changed. That whatever growing is supposed to happen in a person has not happened in him, and the proof is that the same argument is available in four minutes after nineteen years of asking.

And that is you in your own kitchen at eleven, or you would not still be reading.

The parable where the man does not know how

Let me give you the shortest parable Jesus told about growth, and the strangest thing in it.

He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how.Mark 4:27

Four things happen in that sentence. A man sleeps. He rises. The seed grows. And he does not know how.

That is the whole mechanism, and it is deliberately unimpressive.

Notice what Jesus does not include. There is no measuring. Nobody in that parable goes out and checks. There is no point at which the man assesses the rate of growth and draws a conclusion about whether the field is working.

And crucially: he could not, because it is happening underground.

You are not able to inspect this and you were never given an instrument for it. It is written that he sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows, he knows not how (Mark 4:27), and knows not how is stated as the normal condition of the man in the story. The Holy Spirit does the growing, and the not knowing is not a fault in the farmer.

Now let me look straight at your evidence, because you have built a nineteen year case and it deserves a proper answer rather than a kind one.

Your evidence is that the argument recurs, in the same shape, in four minutes.

Here is the problem with it. You are measuring the situation, and concluding about the person.

Those are different things. That argument has two people in it, a whole history, a subject you will not name, and a set of grooves worn in over nineteen years by both of you. That it recurs tells you something true about the situation and almost nothing about what has been happening in you.

You have been reading a recurrence as a verdict, and it was never one. It is written that the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience (Galatians 5:22), and it is called fruit rather than performance because fruit is what a tree produces over seasons and not what it does on a Sunday. The Holy Spirit is not assessed on a four minute sample.

And I want to say the thing about the four minutes, because I think you have got it exactly backwards.

You told me it took four minutes and you offered that as the worst part.

A man who has heard his own voice doing that since he was twenty-two, and who can now describe it in detail, and who noticed it happening while it was happening, and who was at eleven o'clock in a kitchen thinking about it rather than justifying it, is not a man in whom nothing has moved.

Twenty-two year old you did not notice. That is the whole difference and it is not nothing.

You are able to see it now, and the seeing is itself part of what has been growing. It is written that we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, and this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:18). The Holy Spirit is named there as the One doing the transforming, and degrees is the word Paul uses for how it comes.