I Only Ever Met It In An Argument

She has never once heard that word said kindly.

Not in thirty-one years. Every single time it has come to her ear it has been inside a disagreement, and usually a hot one, and usually with somebody's jaw set.

Her uncle used it about other people at a table when she was nine and the room went quiet. A man at college used it about her family in a way that was meant to land and did. She has heard it on television in the mouths of people being paid to be angry. She has heard it in a church corridor, twice, said quietly, which was worse.

So the word arrives pre-loaded. It comes into her ear already tasting of a fight, and she braces before she has heard the sentence it is in, and she has done that so many times that the bracing is now faster than the hearing.

And I want to name what that costs, because it is not obvious.

It means she has never met the word. She has only ever met the arguments people were having around it. Thirty-one years of a container and never once the contents.

So let me ask you.

Which word arrives in your ear already tasting of an argument?

He is doing arithmetic, not debate

I teach carefully and I am going to stay strictly inside what the text says, because this is exactly the sort of subject where people stretch.

Paul is writing in Romans about who is included, and he has an argument available to him. He could take a side. He is perfectly capable of it and he does it elsewhere.

Watch what he does instead.

For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile, the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on Him.Romans 10:12

Now read the grammar rather than the temperature. There is no opponent anywhere in that sentence. Nobody is being answered. It is not a rebuttal and it is not a defense.

It is a count and a description. No difference. The same Lord. Lord of all. Blesses all.

You are inside the word all four times over in Romans 10, and the Spirit who carried that sentence to Rome did not send it as ammunition, which means the thing you have been bracing against was never in the sentence at all.

And here is the point I want to land, and I will be precise about it.

You have been treating the word as though its meaning were the argument you keep meeting it in. That is a completely understandable mistake and it is still a mistake, and the two things are separable.

A word is not the room you heard it in.

The word says the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on Him, and richly is a word about abundance and not about winning. The Spirit has been doing that blessing all week, in rooms where nobody was arguing about anything, in the mouths of people who have never once used that word as a weapon and would not know how.

You have thirty-one years of the container. The contents are still there and nobody has touched them. Romans 10 says the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, and the Spirit has never once let an argument empty a word He filled.