Loving A House You Argue With

He can date it. That is what makes it hard to put down.

A Tuesday, two years ago, in a small room, reading something he had read a dozen times, and a detail that he had always taken one way came apart in his hands and would not go back together.

It is not a large thing. He wants that understood before anything else, and he would say it again under oath. It does not touch the center. There are people he loves and respects who take the other view and he would not accuse one of them of anything.

But he cannot unsee it, and he has tried, honestly, for two years, from both directions, and it has not moved.

And that is the whole of the difficulty, because the house he sits in every week teaches it the other way. Not aggressively. Not often. It comes up perhaps three or four times a year, in passing, as an assumption rather than a claim, which is worse, because you cannot answer an assumption without making a scene.

He was formed there. His grandfather sat in that same room. He learned to read the text from a man in that building who has been dead nine years and whose margin notes are in his own copy.

Here is what he has actually been doing for two years, and he is too precise a man to pretend otherwise.

He has been quietly conducting an inquiry into his own right to be there.

Am I a hypocrite. Is a man who differs on this and says nothing being kind or being dishonest. If I stay, what am I saying by staying. If I go, what am I doing to a room that has never once been anything but good to me.

Nobody in that building knows any of this. He has been at it, alone, for two years, and the inquiry has never returned a verdict, and it convenes about once a fortnight, usually on the way home.

Whereto we have already attained, let us walk by the same rule

Sit down at the back for a minute, because there is a sentence at the end of a hard chapter in Philippians that was written for people in exactly your position, and it is one of the least dramatic sentences Paul ever wrote.

He has just said that he has not arrived and is not perfect and is pressing on, and then he says that if anybody thinks differently, God will make it clear, and then this.

Nevertheless, whereto we have already attained, let us walk by the same rule, let us mind the same thing.Philippians 3:16

Whereto we have already attained.

That is a sentence about people who are not at the same place, written by a man who has just said he is not at the end himself, and the instruction is not to sort out the difference before walking. It is to walk, by what is already held in common, which in any real house is nearly everything.

Hear this in your grandfather's room. You are not a hypocrite for sitting there, and the written word is what settles it, not diplomacy. Scripture assumes people at different stages walking under one rule, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept you in that room for two years while the inquiry ran.

Now let me name what the inquiry actually is, because you have been running it in good faith and it is built on a hidden premise.

The premise is that belonging is a statement of complete agreement, and that every week you sit there you are signing something. Nothing written in Scripture says that, and the Holy Spirit has never asked anybody for a signature.

You are not signing anything. Nobody in that building thinks you are, and if you asked the four people whose opinion you would actually take, all four of them would look at you strangely, and at least two of them would then tell you a difference of their own that they have never mentioned either.

Hear this too. Your integrity is not in danger, and Scripture is what says so. What is written tells people who differ to walk by what they have attained, and the Spirit of God has never made uniformity the condition of a place at a table, and a man honestly holding one difference in a house is not a fraud, he is a member.

And now the thing I most want you to see, and it is about the dead man whose margin notes you have.

He taught you to read. That is what you actually got from him and it is the thing that will outlast the whole disagreement.

And a man who teaches somebody to read has already accepted, on the day he starts, that the reader will one day see something he did not see. That is not a betrayal of the teaching. That is the teaching, arriving.

Your grandfather sat in that room. The man with the margin notes sat in that room. And the reason you can see the detail at all is that they handed you the tools, in that building, on purpose.