She has carried a picture of herself for most of her life and she has never once inspected it.
In the picture there are two of her. There is the real one, which is somewhere inside and is not made of anything, and which will go on. And there is the other one, which is the arms and the back and the knees and the appetite, and which is the container the real one is being delivered in.
She would not put it that way out loud. If you said it back to her she would object, and she would be able to quote things against it, and she would mean the objection.
But watch what she does.
She apologizes for being tired the way you apologize for a fault. She treats hunger as an interruption to whatever she was actually doing. When her back goes, which it does now, she is not sad about it in the way you are sad about a real loss, she is impatient with it in the way you are impatient with a car.
And when she prays, the first thing that happens, always, is that she tries to leave.
Not the room. Herself. She goes up and in, away from the knees on the floor and the cold and the noise from the road, because that is where she thinks she is going to find Him and because the rest of it is just the vehicle.
Sixty-one years of that.
So let me ask you.
Which part of you have you been treating as the real one?
The breath went into the dust, not instead of it
Go to the beginning, because that is where the picture gets set.
The first thing the Bible says about the making of a human being is not about a soul arriving. It is about hands and soil.
Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.Genesis 2:7
Read the order and read the arithmetic.
Dust first. Then breath into the dust. And then a third thing that is neither of those on its own: the man became a living being.
Genesis 2 has God shaping the ground with His hands before He breathes anything at all, and the same Spirit whose name means breath went into the dust rather than instead of it, so your body has never been the packaging that the real you arrives in.
There is no point in that verse where the dust is discarded. It does not say He made a man out of breath and then wrapped him in soil for the journey. The living being is what happens when the two are one thing.
Now, gently, because this is a picture you did not choose and it came to you from a long way back.
I am not going to tell you that nothing in you outlasts your body. That is not what I am saying and it is not what the passage is doing, and I have no interest in tidying up mysteries that are meant to stay large.
What I am saying is much simpler and it is about where you go when you pray.
Genesis 2 puts the making in the soil and the breath into the soil, and the Spirit has never once required a person to leave their own knees to be near Him, which means the going up and in that you have done for sixty-one years was never the route.
You have been trying to get out of the very thing He shaped on purpose.
Now the turn, and it is a direction rather than an effort.
Stay where you are.
That is the whole instruction. Next time you pray, do not go up and do not go in. Stay in the knees and the cold and the noise from the road, and let the ache be part of the room rather than the thing you are escaping. Genesis 2 has God forming a man out of the dust and breathing into him, and the Spirit was in both halves of that at once, so you are not two things trying to get away from each other.
You are not being asked to believe anything new about bodies or souls, and I am not going to rule on anything anybody argues about.
Genesis 2 says He formed the man from the dust and breathed into him there, and the Spirit whose very name is breath has never once asked a person to leave the ground He shaped, so the going up was never the route and the staying is not a lesser prayer.
Sixty-one years of trying to get out. Try one minute of staying in.
Declare this over yourself
Say these where you can hear yourself. Know what holds them up. This authority is not yours by nature, it is Christ's, and in Christ it has been given to you, so you speak as one representing the King. And you speak under His will, never over it. However He answers, and in whatever way He comes, the outcome is His.
- Packaging, you are not the part of me that matters least and I was never carried inside you. Genesis 2 says He formed the man from the dust of the ground first and breathed into that, and nowhere in the verse is the dust put aside.
- Habit of leaving myself the moment I start praying, you have run sixty-one years of my kneeling, and in the name of Jesus you are stopped. The Spirit whose own name is breath went into the ground He had shaped and never once around it.
- Lord, Genesis 2 says the man became a living being, which is what happened when the two were one thing. I am holding something cold and heavy with my knees where they are, and I am staying in the ground You made.
Genesis 2:7
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