The Line I Nearly Swallowed

For the believer who has been rushing past the one sentence he could actually stand on.

There's a card taped inside the door of the meter cupboard, and the tape has gone brown.

Somebody put it there in about 1994, judging by the handwriting and the biro. It's eight words long and it was almost certainly meant for whoever came to read the meter on a dark evening. He's opened that cupboard perhaps four hundred times.

This morning the boiler was doing something, and he was down there with a torch in his teeth, and the light caught the card at an angle it doesn't normally catch it.

He read it properly for the first time in twenty years. It says, in blue biro: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

He stayed crouched in front of a meter cupboard for longer than a man reasonably should, because it turns out he's been walking past a whole sentence every week and has never once considered whether he agrees with it.

You are able to stop at the first sentence and actually agree with it. The written Word opens on a claim plain enough to stand on, and the Holy Spirit is the one making it live in you rather than leaving it in the past tense.

Why the First Line Gets Skipped

It's the most familiar sentence in the English language after a couple of nursery rhymes, and familiarity is the whole problem.

You've heard it so often that your mind treats it as a title rather than a claim. It's the thing that comes before the real content, the way a company name comes before a letter, and nobody reads a letterhead.

So you go past it to get to the material. You've done the same with every old sentence you know. The opening line of anything is where attention is thinnest, because attention arrives about four seconds after the mouth starts moving.

That's not carelessness. It's how anybody handles a sentence they've heard a thousand times, and the cost is that the plainest, heaviest claim you own is the one you've been treating as a heading.

Eight Words You Can Actually Stand On

Here's the line on the card, which is also the line the whole book opens with:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.Genesis 1:1 (KJV)

Read it as a sentence somebody wrote down meaning it. There's no argument in it, no defense, and nothing aimed at anybody. It's a statement about who is behind what there is.

And notice how much of your life it touches. If it's true, then the boiler, the meter, the dark evening, the man crouched with a torch are all inside something made on purpose by somebody who meant it.

You are standing inside something that was made on purpose, and the first line says so. The written Word opens on that claim with no hedging anywhere in it, and the Holy Spirit makes it a present fact rather than an ancient opinion.

The Sentence You Skip Is Usually Load Bearing

Here's what I'd carry out of that cupboard if I could take a single thing away with me.

In any old building the piece you stop noticing is almost always structural. The decorative bits get looked at, discussed and occasionally replaced. The lintel over the door gets painted the same color as the wall and disappears, and it's holding the whole opening up.

Sentences work the same way. The ones you skip are rarely the ornamental ones. They're the ones so basic that everything else in your faith is resting on them, which is precisely why they've gone invisible.

So the line he'd walked past four hundred times wasn't a nice thought somebody taped up in 1994. It was the lintel, painted the same color as the wall.

The sentence you skip is not the ornament, it is the lintel. The written Word puts its heaviest claim in its plainest sentence, so what you've walked past is what everything else is resting on, and the Holy Spirit is the one holding that claim up underneath you now.

Nothing Here Is a Test of Your Attention

Let me be plain, because there's a version of this message that would do harm and I refuse to write it.

Nobody is grading the four hundred times you opened that cupboard without reading the card. Attention isn't a virtue you can manufacture by trying harder, and a man who's been going past a true sentence for twenty years hasn't been failing at anything.

I'm also not saying the old words are binding, or that a believer whose room has never recited a line of them is missing something. The faith is the same faith in a building that says them and in one that never has.

You can find the sentence late and it will have waited without complaint. Scripture puts the claim there and leaves it there, and the Holy Spirit does the noticing rather than the grading.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.