The Sentence That Waited for Me

For the believer who assumed she had arrived late to something that had moved on without her.

Paul is coming to the end of a difficult letter, and he stops to hand the Corinthians the thing he considers most important.

He's spent fifteen chapters on their arguments. Factions, lawsuits, a scandal, a mess about meals, a considerable amount of pride. He's corrected them at length and the correcting has cost him something, and now he reaches the part he calls first of all.

He doesn't compose it. That's the detail I keep going back to. A man who has written more of the New Testament than almost anybody arrives at the most important paragraph of his letter and passes on somebody else's sentence.

For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures.1 Corinthians 15:3-4 (KJV)

Received, then delivered. Before it reached Paul it had already been carried by people whose names we don't have, and after him it reached Corinth, and it has gone on reaching people ever since without anybody improving it.

You did not arrive late, because the sentence has been traveling toward you the whole time. The written Word shows it being received and handed on without ever being finished, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it the last few inches into you.

The Feeling of Having Missed It

She's forty four, and she came to all this at thirty nine, and she cannot shake the sense that she walked in during the second half.

Everybody around her seems to have been here forever. They know when to stand. They know which verse is coming. They have a childhood inside this and she has five years, and when the old words start she can hear herself half a syllable behind everybody, which feels like exactly what it is.

So she's developed a way of holding it lightly. She joins in, she means well, and some part of her stands slightly outside the whole business on the assumption that she's a guest at something that was fully formed before she got here.

You may know that posture. It isn't insecurity exactly, and it certainly isn't a weak faith. It's the reasonable conclusion of somebody who arrived at a sentence that was already two thousand years old and assumed the sentence had a cut off date.

Nobody in the Chain Was First

Look at who's handing what to whom in that passage.

Paul received it. Somebody handed it to him, and those people had received it from others, and every single person in that line got it the way she did, which is to say from somebody who had it before them.

There is no point in the entire chain where a person invented the sentence and everybody else came late. Even Paul, with all his standing, is explicitly a recipient. The whole thing moves by being handed over, and everybody who has ever held it was handed it by somebody who was handed it.

You received it exactly the way everyone before you received it. The written Word describes the faith traveling from hand to hand with no original owner in the line, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put it into yours.

A Sentence Has No Cut-Off Date

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

Whatever expires has a shape. A ticket, a meeting, a train, an offer: each one has a moment after which you missed it, and missing it is a real event with real consequences.

A true sentence has none of that architecture. It doesn't have a start time you can be late for or a door that closes. It was true before you were born, it was true through all thirty nine years when you weren't listening, and the only thing that changed at thirty nine was the direction you were facing.

She hasn't walked in during the second half. She's walked into something that has no halves, and her five years and somebody else's fifty are both simply the length of time each of them has been holding it.

Nothing you came to late had a door that closed while you weren't looking. The written Word carries the same sentence to every generation without amendment, and the Holy Spirit makes it as present for a woman of five years as for anybody in the room.

Nothing Here Ranks Anybody's Years

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

The people who've been here since childhood aren't holding something better than you. They're holding the same sentence, and quite a few of them would tell you they've spent decades saying it without hearing it, which is its own kind of late arrival.

I'm also not saying these particular words are binding, or that a believer in a room that's never recited a line of them is missing anything. The faith is the same faith wherever it's held, and the chain runs through every kind of room.

You can hold five years or fifty and be holding exactly the same thing. Scripture hands the sentence on without ranking the recipients, and the Holy Spirit does the delivering rather than the measuring.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.