I Have Been Bracing To Be Cut Off

She has been serving in that place for fourteen years and she still does not sit down properly.

Somebody said it to her as a compliment. Said, you never stop, do you. And she laughed and went to get the chairs, and later, driving, she thought about the word never and did not like where it went.

Because it is not devotion. Some of it is. But under the good part there is a thing she has never said to a living soul, and it goes like this.

If I keep moving they will not notice me long enough to see it.

See what, she could not tell you. That is the maddening part. There is no secret. There is no sin she is hiding and no double life. It is more that she has read one paragraph of one chapter perhaps four hundred times in her life, the one about branches being broken off, and be not highminded but fear, and she has never in fourteen years managed to read the rest of the chapter with the same attention.

The warning went in. The promise did not.

So she serves like a woman on probation, and she is excellent at it, and everybody thinks she is the strongest person in the building.

And at half past ten at night, alone, she is a woman standing in her own kitchen bracing for a knife.

You know that bracing.

Maybe you have it about a different verse. Maybe somebody said something to you at seventeen that put it in. Maybe you cannot point at any source at all and it is simply the temperature you live at.

Nobody did this on purpose. A warning is loud and a promise is quiet, and a frightened person reads the loud one first and then reads it again, and after enough years the loud one is the whole chapter as far as their body is concerned.

Where the hand is

Here is a sentence from a different page of the same book, and I want you to notice how the sentence is built, because the architecture of it is the point.

And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father's hand.John 10:28-29

Two hands. Not one.

And read what the security rests on. Not on the strength of the sheep. Not on the sheep's grip, or the sheep's record, or the sheep's ability to keep still. On the size of the one holding, which is stated outright: My Father is greater than all.

So the question is not whether you can hold on. That was never the question and it was never the arrangement. The question is who is holding, and how big they are, and the verse answers both before you can ask.

You are held in a hand, and the security of it rests on the size of the one holding rather than the strength of your grip. That is exactly how the sentence is built, greater than all, and no man is able (John 10:28-29), and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the earnest of your inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession (Ephesians 1:14), which is a deposit put down by somebody who has no intention of losing what He paid for.

About the warning you have read four hundred times

Now let us deal honestly with the paragraph that put the fear in, because I am not going to pretend it is not there.

It is there. It is real. It is in the Bible and it says what it says, and this page is not going to explain it away, or tell you it means something other than what it appears to mean, or hand you a system that files it neatly. That is an argument between good people and it has been going on for centuries and it will not be settled here.

Here is what can be said without settling anything at all.

That warning is aimed at boasting. Read the sentence directly before it. It is spoken to a branch that is looking down at other branches and feeling superior, and every word of it is a corrective to arrogance.

It is not aimed at a woman who cannot sit down in her own church.

You have been standing under a warning that was never pointed at you, and the fear it produced is not the fear it was written to produce. Scripture says God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind (2 Timothy 1:7), and it is the Holy Spirit named in that verse as the opposite of what you have been living in, which is how you can tell where the bracing came from and where it did not.

And I will not hand you a certainty I cannot give. What I can tell you is what the passage does with a frightened branch, and it is not what it does with a proud one.