He can give you the answer and he cannot get to it on a Tuesday.
That is not false modesty. He genuinely can give you the answer. Ask him what is true about God's kindness in the middle of a bad month and he will tell you accurately, in order, with the places it is written, and it will be a help to you.
Then he will go to work.
And somewhere between the front door and the second roundabout, all of it will be four hundred miles away, and by the time he gets to his desk he will be operating out of something else entirely: the tightness in his chest, the number in the account, the thing that was said to him in March.
He is not a hypocrite. He has never once said a thing he did not believe.
He simply has a knowing that lives in one place and a life that happens in another, and no road between them that he has ever been able to find.
He has tried to fix it with more knowing. That is the part that would break your heart. Another book, another course, the same true things learned more thoroughly, on the assumption that if he understood it well enough it would eventually arrive somewhere.
Nineteen years of that. And every Tuesday, the roundabout.
So let me ask you.
Where does what you know actually live in your house?
The instruction after the great commandment is a list of places
There is a passage that carries the most famous commandment in the Hebrew Bible, and everybody knows the first half.
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. That is the summit and everybody quotes it.
And then, immediately, comes something that reads almost as an anticlimax, and it is not one.
These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.Deuteronomy 6:6 to 9
Count what is in that list. Sitting. Walking. Lying down. Getting up. Hands. Foreheads. Doorframes. Gates.
Deuteronomy 6 answers the greatest commandment with a set of physical placements rather than with a deeper interior grasp, and the Spirit who gave that law knew exactly how a human being actually holds anything, so getting a truth into your hands has never been a lower activity than getting it into your understanding.
Every item on that list is a location. Not one of them is a state of mind.
And notice the shape of the problem it is solving. It is not solving ignorance. The people receiving that instruction had just been given the commandment; they knew it. What they lacked was a route from knowing it to living on a Tuesday, and the answer supplied is placement.
Now let me be careful, because this is a text people have practiced in particular ways for a very long time and I am not going to adjudicate any of that, in any direction, for anybody.
I am pointing at the structure. Deuteronomy 6 puts the great commandment and then a hallway, and the Spirit was in the doorframe as much as in the summit, which means the gap you have spent nineteen years trying to close with more understanding was never an understanding gap.
You have been going deeper. The instruction was to go outward, onto the things your hands touch.
Now the move, and it is outward rather than deeper.
Give it an address.
Not more understanding. You have plenty and it has never once made the journey. Pick a place your body actually goes, and put the thing there.
The doorframe on the way out. The kettle. The steering wheel before you start the engine. The stairs. It does not matter which, and the ordinariness is not a compromise, it is the specification.
Deuteronomy 6 answers the greatest commandment with hands and gates and doorframes, and the Spirit was in every one of those placements, so an ordinary object has always been a legitimate place to keep a truth.
Nineteen years of going deeper. Try one doorframe.
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.
- Knowing, you are real and accurate and you have no address in this house. Deuteronomy 6 answers the greatest commandment with sitting and walking and lying down and hands and doorframes and gates, and not one item on that list is a state of mind.
- Nineteen years of trying to close a gap with more understanding, you have been the wrong tool used sincerely, and in the name of Jesus you are set down. The Spirit who gave that law knew exactly how a person actually holds anything.
- Lord, Deuteronomy 6 puts the summit and then the hallway, and You were in the doorframe as much as in the commandment. My hand is on the wood this morning, and what I know is getting an address at last.
Deuteronomy 6:8
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.
