The Two Words I Had Been Skipping

For the believer who can say the whole sentence and has never once let the last two words land.

The shortest phrase in the verse is the one your mouth has been sliding over for twenty years.

It's two words long. It carries no doctrine anybody argues about, it has never caused a split, and there isn't a commentary in the world that spends much time on it. It sits at the end of a long famous sentence, and almost every person who says that sentence arrives at those two words already slowing down to stop.

For me.

He found this out in a hotel room in Birmingham, of all places, on a Wednesday, saying the verse to himself because he couldn't sleep and it was the only long thing he knew by heart.

He got to the end. He heard himself say the two words at about half the volume of everything before them, the way you'd read out a footnote. Then he said the whole line again, deliberately, and the same thing happened.

Twenty years of a sentence about the Son of God giving Himself, with the part where it reaches him delivered like an administrative detail.

You are able to let the last two words land, and the whole sentence has been aimed at you the entire time. The written Word puts the personal clause at the end on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one making it true of you rather than about you.

Why the Personal Half Gets Rushed

There's a good instinct underneath this, which is what makes it so hard to catch.

You were taught, properly, not to make the faith about yourself. You know that the center is God rather than you, and you've watched what happens to people who forget that, and the carefulness in you is a form of reverence.

So when the sentence arrives at you, some part of you steps back. It feels more respectful to hurry past the personal clause than to stand in it, and hurrying past has become so habitual that you no longer hear yourself doing it.

That isn't humility exactly, though it's grown from humility's root. It's what happens when a person is so careful not to put himself at the center that he cannot receive the part God aimed directly at him.

The Clause at the End

Here's the whole sentence, with those two words where Paul put them:

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.Galatians 2:20 (KJV)

Look at how he builds it. Four clauses of theology, each one taking the writer further out of the center, until there's almost nothing of him left in the sentence at all.

Then it turns, and the last two clauses come straight back at him. Loved me. Gave himself for me. He spends the whole line removing himself and finishes by naming himself twice.

You are personally named at the end of a sentence that spent four clauses getting smaller. The written Word closes on the two words aimed at one reader, and the Holy Spirit makes that aim land on you today.

The Smallest Words Carry the Most Weight

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

We assume importance follows length. The long clauses feel like the substance, the short ones feel like grammar, and a two word phrase at the end of a sentence reads like punctuation with letters in it.

It's precisely backward. The long clauses in that verse are statements anybody could make about Christ, and a person could agree with every one of them from a considerable distance, across a room, in a hotel bed, with the lamp off. The two short words are what make the distance impossible to keep.

Take for me out of that verse and everything remaining is still true, still glorious, and no longer about anybody in particular. Those two syllables are what turn a statement into an address, the way a name written on an envelope turns paper into post.

Two syllables are the whole difference between a statement and a letter with your name on it. The written Word puts the personal clause last, where the weight of a sentence falls, and the Holy Spirit is the one delivering it to your door.

This Isn't a Test of How You Say Anything

Let me be plain, because there's a version of this message that would do harm and I won't write it.

Nobody is grading your delivery, and twenty years of hurrying past a phrase hasn't cost you anything with God. The words were true at full volume and true at half volume, and He has not been standing at the end of the sentence waiting for better enunciation.

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

You can find the two words late and they will have been true through every rushed reading. Scripture puts them there and leaves them there, and the Holy Spirit does the landing rather than the marking.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.