Some Of Them Doubted And He Sent Them Anyway

He stopped nine years ago and he stopped honestly, which is the part nobody gives him credit for.

He did not drift. He did not get busy. He hit something he could not answer, and he decided that continuing would be a kind of pretending, and he had too much respect for the whole thing to pretend.

So he put it all down. Cleanly. And he has been living in that decision ever since.

And here is the rule he set himself at the time, which he has never once revisited.

He is allowed to go back when he has resolved it.

That sounds reasonable. It sounds like integrity. It is the sentence a serious man says.

But nine years have gone by, and the thing has not resolved, and there is no version of the next ten years in which it does, because it is not the kind of question that resolves.

So the rule has quietly become a life sentence, passed by a man on himself, in good faith, at thirty-two.

And underneath it, and this is the part he does not say out loud, he misses it every single week.

So let me ask you.

What would you have to be certain of before you were allowed to start again?

They worshiped and some doubted, in one sentence

There is a scene at the very end of Matthew, on a mountain, and it is the last thing that gospel records before the commissioning, and there is a half sentence in it that most people read straight past.

This is not early. This is after everything. These are the eleven, at the end, on a hill they were told to go to.

When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.Matthew 28:17

Read it as one sentence, because that is how it was written.

They worshiped. And some doubted. Same mountain, same moment, same group of men, and Matthew does not tidy it up and does not tell us which ones or how it got resolved, because it is not recorded that it did.

Matthew 28 puts worship and doubt in one sentence about one group without separating them, and the Spirit who moved that writer left the doubting in the record rather than editing it out, so the resolution you have waited nine years for has never once been what got anybody onto that mountain.

Now, my friend, let me be careful with you, because you are honest and honest men deserve accurate answers.

I am not going to tell you the question you stopped over does not matter. You are not a man who stops over trivia and I am not going to patronize you.

And I am not going to hand you an answer to it in a paragraph, because if it could be answered in a paragraph you would have found the paragraph in nine years.

I am telling you what happens in the very next verse. He comes over and speaks to them. All of them. The commissioning is given to the group with the doubters standing in it.

Matthew 28 has Him addressing that whole mixed group in the next breath rather than sorting them first, and the Spirit was in that sending, which means the rule you passed on yourself at thirty-two has been enforcing a condition nobody on that hill was ever held to. You are not the exception to that scene. You are standing in it.

And notice what is not there. There is no rebuke. There is no separating out. There is no interval in which the doubting ones are dealt with before anything else can happen.

He simply comes and speaks.

Matthew 28 records no correction of the doubters anywhere between the doubt and the commission, and the Spirit left that gap empty on purpose, so carrying a question you cannot answer has never once put you outside the group being spoken to. You have been waiting for a clearance that was never issued to anybody, because it was never required.