The Song Across Two Ridgelines

For the believer who thinks the repair has to come first.

What do you think has to happen before that prayer can be answered?

Answer it honestly, because almost everybody carrying this has a sequence in their head and almost nobody has ever said it out loud. Something has to be sorted. A conversation has to go well. Somebody has to apologize, or a document has to be revised, or four hundred years have to be reckoned with by people considerably more qualified than you.

Then, once all of that is done, the oneness arrives, like a certificate at the end of a process.

That sequence is entirely invented, and it is the reason a great many good people carry a low-grade discouragement about the church for their whole lives. You are waiting for a repair before a thing that was never waiting on the repair.

She walks the hill road between two valleys most evenings, and she thinks about this because of what she hears up there when the air is still.

Nothing has to be repaired before the prayer can be answered, because it was never waiting on the repair. The written Word puts the asking in Christ's own mouth rather than in a process, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying what He asked for.

The Sequence in Your Head

Here's where the sequence comes from, and it comes from something decent rather than something foolish.

You have watched people try to bridge these gaps, and you have seen how hard it is, and you have concluded, reasonably, that it is a large engineering problem. Large engineering problems have stages. Stages happen in order. Nothing arrives until the stages are complete.

Applied to buildings, that is entirely correct. Applied to what Christ asked His Father for, it puts a condition on a prayer that He never put on it, and it puts the condition in the hands of people who cannot possibly satisfy it.

So the discouragement is not a failure of faith. It's the logical consequence of a sequence you were never given and have never examined.

What He Actually Asked For

Here's the request, in the form He made it:

That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us.John 17:21, the opening lines (KJV)

Read the model He uses. Not a treaty, not a merger, not a settlement of disputed questions. The oneness He asks for is compared to the oneness between the Father and the Son, and that is not a negotiated arrangement between two parties who worked something out.

It is a shared life. And He asks for His people to be one in us, which locates the whole thing inside God rather than between the parties.

The oneness He asked for is a shared life in God rather than an agreement between parties. The written Word models it on the Father and the Son, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it real rather than negotiated.

Two Valleys Hear the Same Weather

Here's what I'd carry off that hill road if I could take a single thing away with me.

There are two valleys either side of that ridge and they are genuinely separate. Different rivers, different roads in, and people who live in one and have barely been to the other.

Stand on the top on a still evening and you can hear a chapel in each of them. Quite often they are singing at the same hour, sometimes even the same tune. Neither valley can hear the other, because the hill is in the way.

Nothing about that requires repair. The hill is not a wound. The two valleys do not need to be merged into one valley for the singing to go up from the same weather, at the same hour, to the same God. The only person who can hear both is the one standing high enough.

Two valleys can sing into the same evening without either being repaired. The written Word puts the oneness inside God rather than between the parties, and the Holy Spirit is the one high enough to hear both.

This Is Not a Report Card on You

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

You have not failed it. It is not the sort of thing available to you to fail, because He asked for it, He is still asking, and it has never waited on anybody's repair work.

I am also not giving you a project. Nothing here asks you to go into either valley and arrange anything, because that would be the same sequence with a nicer motive attached to it.

You can stop waiting for the repair without pretending the hill is not there. Scripture hands the request to nobody, and the Holy Spirit does the work rather than handing it on.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.