Right Without An Audience

He has read more about it than anybody he knows.

That is not a boast and he would be embarrassed to have it put that way, but it is simply the case: six years, properly, from both sides, including the two books that argue the opposite and one of which he found genuinely good. He has changed his position twice along the way. He has the notes.

He is, in his considered and carefully arrived at view, right.

The trouble is what right has turned into.

It has become a thing he carries into rooms. Not aggressively. He does not raise it, he is not the man who brings it up, and if you sat next to him at a supper you might not find out about any of it.

But it is in his hands the whole time.

He can tell within about four minutes of meeting somebody roughly where they stand, and after that there is a small permanent adjustment in how he listens to them, and he does not enjoy knowing that about himself.

And there is a specific thing that happens with three or four people in particular. He runs it. In the car, mostly. The whole argument, in order, with their objections and his answers, and it always ends with them seeing it.

That is the tell, and he has recently noticed it. The imagined conversation never ends with them disagreeing and the evening carrying on pleasantly. It ends with them saying yes, actually, I had not thought of it like that.

He has been waiting six years for a sentence somebody may never say.

Have it to thyself before God

Put the tools down a minute, because there is a verse in the written word that offers a man exactly what you have not been able to find, and the Holy Spirit put it there for men who have thought about something for six years. It is usually misread as a muzzle.

Paul has spent a chapter on people with genuine and opposite convictions about real matters, and he refuses, deliberately, to settle it for them. And then he says this.

Hast thou faith? have it to thyself before God. Happy is he that condemneth not himself in that thing which he alloweth.Romans 14:22

Read the first half carefully, because it is not what people think.

The written word does not say you are wrong. It does not say stop thinking. It says: have it. Keep it. It is yours, hold it, and hold it before God, which is a location, not a silencing, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that location a real place and not a shelf.

That is a place to put a conviction. Not the bin. A place.

Hear this at your own bench. You are not being asked to give up what you have worked out, and the written word is what settles it, not diplomacy. Scripture leaves the conviction in your hands and moves where you hold it, and the Holy Spirit has been in the six years of work, and He is not asking for the notes.

Now let me name what has actually happened, because the reading and the thinking were never the problem.

Somewhere in the six years, being right stopped being a conclusion and became a position that requires maintenance. And a position that requires maintenance needs traffic: people to test it on, conversations to run it through, and above all somebody to concede.

That is what the car is for. That is what the four minutes of assessment is for.

And here is the arithmetic of it, which is brutal and simple. You are holding a thing that only settles when somebody else says a sentence, which means the settling of it is not in your gift, which means you have handed your rest to a group of people who do not know they are holding it.

Hear this too, and let it get into your shoulders. You are not going to be less right by putting it down, and Scripture is what says so. What is written keeps the conviction entirely intact and only relocates it, and the Spirit of God is the one who has been carrying what is true long before you read a word of it, and He does not need it defended in a car.

And now the second half of the verse, which is the mercy in it.

Happy is he that condemneth not himself in that thing which he alloweth. Blessed is the man who is not at war with himself about the thing he has settled.

That is the offer. Not the removal of your conviction. The end of the tension in it. A man may be entirely persuaded, and rest.

You have been persuaded for six years and you have not rested once, and the written word offers the rest without asking for the persuasion, and the Holy Spirit is the one who hands it over.