You Can Kneel Before You Have Settled It

There is a woman who stopped eleven years ago and has never told anybody how much she misses it.

She could give you reasons. She has given them at dinner tables, briskly, with a shrug, and every one of the reasons is real and some of them are serious and none of them are what this is about.

What this is about is her hands.

Because sometimes she is in a strange town on a Saturday and she sees an open door and a stone step, and she goes in, and she sits at the back where the light comes through in color, and she does not do anything. She does not say the words. She has not decided about the words. She sits with her coat on her knees and her hands doing that thing they still do without being asked, and she stays about four minutes, and then she gets up and walks out and does not tell a living soul.

She has done this maybe nine times in eleven years.

And every single time, in the street afterwards, the same thought arrives, and it is not a comfortable one: I have no right to that.

Because in her head there is a queue, and the queue works like this. First you sort out what you believe. All of it. The things you were taught and never checked, the thing that happened when you were nineteen, the argument you have never won with yourself about a God who allows what He allows. You resolve that. You get to the end of it. And then, cleared and certain and entitled, you are allowed to walk back in and kneel down like a person who means it.

She has been standing in that queue for eleven years.

And nobody, in the whole of that time, has told her that the queue is not real.

The practice may go first

Let me tell you about a man who came to Jesus with a boy nobody could help.

He had been round everybody. He had that particular exhaustion of a parent who has stopped expecting anything and cannot stop trying anyway. And when he finally got in front of Jesus he did the honest thing, which is also the tactless thing. He said: if you can do anything, have compassion on us.

If.

And Jesus turned that word back to him, and the man broke, and what came out of him is one of the most useful sentences in the whole of Scripture for anybody standing in that queue.

I believe. Help my unbelief.Mark 9:24

Look at what he did there. He did not sort himself out first. He did not go away, resolve the question, and come back qualified. He walked up carrying both things at once, the belief and the hole in the belief, and he said them in the same breath, out loud, in front of everybody.

And nothing was withheld from him for it.

Beloved, hear the whole weight of that. He was not sent to the back of the line to get his certainty in order. The thing he came for was not made conditional on him arriving whole.

So here is what I want to hand you tonight, and I want to hand it gently, because I know how long you have been holding this.

The practice is allowed to be ahead of your certainty.

The kneeling may go first. The sitting at the back with your coat on your knees may go first. The four minutes in a strange town may go first, and it does not have to be endorsed by a settled mind before it counts as real.

Your body is permitted to arrive before your argument finishes. That is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is pretending you have arrived where you have not. This is the opposite of that. This is a person saying: here is what I have got, and here is what I have not got, and I am bringing both. Mark 9 has a father say I do believe and help my unbelief in one breath, and the Spirit left both halves standing in the record, so you are bringing exactly what that man brought.

I am not telling you where to go. I do not know your situation, and I would not presume to send you anywhere or call you away from anywhere. That is not mine and it never will be.

I am telling you that the door was never bolted, and the step is not a test, and the queue you have been standing in for eleven years is one you built. Mark 9 records no interval at all between that divided sentence and what came next, and the Spirit was in the answering.