Ask her who told her and she cannot name one person.
She has believed this since she was small. It has been in her the whole way through, and she cannot point at a single human being and say: that one. That is the mouth it came out of.
So she has concluded that it came from nowhere in particular. A general atmosphere. Something in the air of a childhood.
And because it came from nowhere, she treats it as weightless.
Watch what she does when it gets hard. She has nothing to fall back on, because falling back requires there to be something behind you, and as far as she knows there is a fog behind her and then nothing.
She is thirty-eight. She has no receipts. She thinks that means there was no transaction.
But somebody told her. That is not a guess, it is arithmetic. A person does not arrive at the age of five knowing the name of Jesus by weather.
Somebody said it out loud, in a room, to a small girl, probably more than once, almost certainly without thinking it was significant, and that person is a real human being who existed.
She just cannot remember which one.
So let me ask you.
Who told you the first thing you ever knew about God?
The psalm is a description of what has already happened to you
There is a psalm that opens by announcing a plan, and the plan is very ordinary and it explains where you came from.
We will not hide them from their descendants; we will tell the next generation the praiseworthy deeds of the LORD, his power, and the wonders he has done.Psalm 78:4
We will tell the next generation.
It is not a metaphor and it is not a system. It is people saying things out loud to children who are in the room.
Psalm 78 describes a chain of ordinary telling running forward through generations, and the Spirit was in that plain arrangement rather than in anything dramatic, so the fact that you cannot name your source has never once meant there was not one.
Now, let me sit with you a moment, because I think this matters more than it looks.
You have confused unremembered with nonexistent, and those are enormously different things.
Everything that formed you before you were about seven is unremembered. That is simply how a person is built. It does not follow that the years were empty; it follows that you were too small to keep the receipts, which is what being a child is.
Psalm 78 puts the telling into the mouths of one generation and the hearing into the ears of the next, and the Spirit was in that handing across, which means the fog you think is behind you is a room with people in it that you are too young to see.
And notice the psalm's own anxiety, because it is the tender part.
The whole reason it insists on telling is that it knows a generation can forget. It is written by people who have watched a chain nearly break.
Psalm 78 goes on for seventy-two verses about a people who kept forgetting what they had been told, and the Spirit put that long memory in the middle of the songbook, so forgetting who told you has never once undone the fact that you were told.
Now here is the turn, and it is a piece of arithmetic, not a feeling.
Accept that somebody told you.
You do not have to know who. You do not have to recover the memory, and you may never recover it, and that is fine.
You only have to stop treating what you carry as if it blew in off a field. It came through hands. Somebody said it out loud to a child who was not paying much attention.
Psalm 78 says we will tell the next generation, and the Spirit was in that telling as it happened rather than in your memory of it, so having no receipt has never once meant there was no transaction.
Thirty-eight years assuming a fog. One person, at least, who spoke.
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.
- Receipt, you are what I lost and the telling still happened to me. Psalm 78 says we will tell the next generation, and telling is people saying things out loud to children who are in the room.
- Fog I believe is behind me instead of a person, you have made everything I carry weightless and left me nothing to fall back on, and in the name of Jesus you are finished. The Spirit was in that handing across long before I was old enough to keep a record of it.
- Lord, Psalm 78 spends seventy-two verses on people who kept forgetting what they had been told, so forgetting was always in the picture. I am saying one name out loud today, and somebody said Your name to a small girl in a room and I did not arrive at it by weather.
Psalm 78:4
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
