The Thing I Swore Off In March

He swore it off in March and he meant it.

That is worth saying first, because he no longer believes it about himself. He meant it in a way he had not meant it the previous four times. He told two people. He changed the route he drove home. He got rid of the thing that made it easy. It was not a mood.

And it held from March to October, which is the longest stretch of his adult life.

And on a Tuesday in October he went back to it.

Not dramatically, and not after a crisis, which he says is somehow the worst part. Nothing had happened that day. He was not in pain and he was not angry and there had not been a fight. He simply arrived at the end of a very ordinary Tuesday and did the thing, deliberately, with about forty minutes of knowing he was going to.

And here is what he has believed since, and he has believed it the way a man believes a fact about the weather.

He believes the Holy Spirit left him that night.

Not that he grieved God. Not that something was strained. He believes there was a Presence in him from the time he was nineteen, and that on that Tuesday he sent it out of the house, and that what he has now is memory and habit and an empty room where Somebody used to be.

He has the date. He could tell you what he was wearing.

And he has kept going to the same seat on the same Sunday for ten months as a man attending a service about Somebody he used to know.

And that is you with your own Tuesday, or you would not still be reading.

The word Paul used is not the word you have been reading

You have almost certainly met this verse. It is very likely one of the reasons you concluded what you concluded, and I want to hand it back to you with the actual word in it.

And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.Ephesians 4:30

Grieve.

Stop there and feel the size of that, because it is not the word you have been carrying. Grief is what a person feels who is still in the room. You cannot grieve at a distance you have already put between yourself and somebody. A Presence that had gone would feel nothing at all, and Paul's warning would be empty air.

The verse you have been using as the record of His departure is the verse that proves He stayed. He was grieved. Grieved is not gone.

You did not send Him out of the house on a Tuesday in October, and the verse you fear says so. It is written, do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God (Ephesians 4:30), and grief is the response of Somebody who is present. The Holy Spirit was in that room, and He was in the car, and He was there for the forty minutes you knew what you were going to do.

And then read the second half, which you have been reading past for ten months because the first half stopped you.

By whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.

That is the same sentence. Paul warns you about grieving Him and in the very next clause tells you what He is doing while grieved: sealing. Not conditionally. Not until further notice. For the day of redemption, which has not happened yet, which means the seal is holding right now, tonight, in the seat you have been sitting in as a visitor.

You are sealed by the same Spirit you believe you drove away, and the sealing has a date on it that is still ahead of you. It is written that you were sealed for the day of redemption (Ephesians 4:30), and a seal set for a future day is a seal that is intact today. The Holy Spirit did not stop sealing a man in October.

And I want to put one more sentence down, and I want it to be flat and without any qualification hanging off the end of it, because you have been braced for the qualification since the first paragraph.

He is here now. In the room you are in. Not on probation, not at a reduced level, not waiting for a stretch of good weeks before He comes back in properly.

You are not cast off, and there is no clause anywhere attached to that. It is written that God has said, I will never leave you nor forsake you (Hebrews 13:5), and never has never once been qualified by what a man did on an ordinary Tuesday. The Holy Spirit stayed, and He has been with you every day of the ten months you have been sitting in that seat believing otherwise.