You Were Never Handed a Gavel

The arm goes up, and the room makes a sound he has never heard a room make.

Third floor, front room over a shut launderette, eleven folding chairs dragged into a ring. A bowl of clementines on the radiator because somebody's mother believes you cannot pray on an empty stomach. A woman in a green cardigan who has not lifted her right arm past her ear since the winter before last. Two people rest a hand on her shoulder. Somebody prays for about forty seconds, nothing loud, nothing theatrical. And then the arm goes up. All the way up, and then again, and she is laughing at it the way a child laughs at a light switch.

He laughs too. It is out of him before he can vote on it.

And then, one second later, maybe two, something drops in his stomach like a coin down a drain. Because he learned to pray at a folding table with a flannel board and a plate of custard creams, from a man who paid his bus fare for two years and sat beside him in a hospital corridor at four in the morning, and that man taught him plainly, gently, straight out of the Bible, that this sort of thing belonged to another time. That man meant every word of it for his good. That man was good.

So the laugh is still on his face while the verdict is already assembling behind it. If this is real, then he was wrong. And there is no way to hold both, so he holds neither, and he goes down three flights of stairs and drives home with the radio off.

You may know the kind of drive where the radio stays off because every answer feels disloyal.

What He asks you to do with a surprise

Let me name the weight, because I do not think loyalty has been called by its proper name.

The thought repeating inside says this is doubt. It is not doubt. In that room, the question was not God cannot do that. The scene appeared to show God doing it, and the thing that went cold inside was loyalty. Love still surrounds the people who handed you faith. Their tone of voice remains audible. The cost of that man's hospital-corridor kindness still matters, and something inside understood, instantly and without being told, that saying yes to what had just been seen might cost him something in your heart.

That is not a small thing and I will not treat it as one. That is a person trying to be honest without being a traitor. It is one of the loneliest places a believer stands in, and most people who stand there never say a word about it to anyone. That is why silence has lasted.

Now hear what the Word actually puts in your hands.

Quench not the Spirit. Despise not prophesyings. Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.1 Thessalonians 5:19-21

Read it slowly, because it is shorter than the argument you have been having with yourself. Prove all things. Hold fast that which is good. Test it, and keep what is good.

Notice what is not there. He does not say prove all things and then publish your findings on everyone who taught you. He does not say hold fast that which is good and then go back through your childhood with a red pen. The instruction is about your hands. It is about what you keep. It is not a commission to sit as a court.

And when Scripture does speak about that court, it speaks about it like this.

Who art thou that judgest another man's servant? to his own master he standeth or falleth. Yea, he shall be holden up: for God is able to make him stand.Romans 14:4

He shall be holden up. God is able to make him stand. That good man is not in your care and he never was. He is held by the same hands that are reaching for you tonight, and those hands are more than able. You do not have to sentence anybody in order to be allowed to open your own.

You are free from the judge's chair now. Romans 14 places every beloved servant before his own Master, and the Holy Spirit opens your hands without turning them against the people who taught you.

Here is what the scene makes plain about a room like that. God did not come down those three flights of stairs and stop at the door because the man was raised in a different house. God was not in that room being generous to strangers and careful with him. He was in the room. He was laughing before his theology caught up, and that laugh belonged honestly to that moment.

The written Word gives you freedom to test and hold what is good, and the Holy Spirit keeps your open heart from becoming an accusation.