She has an objection and it is a good one, which is why it has held for twenty years.
The objection is this. God knows.
He knows the thing, in detail, better than she does. He knows what she thinks about it at two in the morning and He knew about it before she did anything. There is no information to be transferred.
So what exactly, she would like to know, is achieved by moving her mouth?
And she is not being cynical. This is a woman who takes accuracy seriously and who dislikes performance in religion more than almost anything, and she has watched a great deal of it and it has left a mark.
To her, saying out loud what God already knows looks like theater. It looks like the thing people do to feel that something has happened. And she has quietly declined to do it for two decades on the grounds that she is not going to put on a show for an audience of one who has already read the script.
It is a serious position and it is honestly held.
And she is now fifty-three, and she has never once said any of it out loud, and something about that has started to sit strangely with her, though she could not yet tell you what.
So let me ask you, precisely.
If He already knows, why does the mouth appear in the verse at all?
There are two verbs and he does not rank them
Paul writes a sentence in Romans that has been argued over for centuries, and I am going to stay inside the grammar rather than the arguments.
He is talking about how a person comes to stand where they stand, and he uses two verbs and puts them in parallel.
For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved.Romans 10:10
Heart and mouth. Believe and profess. Two clauses built identically.
Romans 10 puts the mouth in the sentence beside the heart and constructs both halves the same way, and the Spirit who moved Paul to write it did not include a redundant clause for rhythm, so speaking has never been the decorative half of anything.
Now, your objection is genuinely right about one thing and I want to grant it fully before I go on.
Nothing you say tells God anything. That is true, it is obviously true, and Scripture agrees with you loudly, in Psalm 139 and elsewhere. If confession were an information transfer it would be pointless and your twenty years of declining would be sound.
So it is not an information transfer. It is something else, and the something else is what the verse is pointing at.
Here is the plainest way I can put it, and I will be precise rather than moving.
A thing that stays inside you is held by you and shaped by you and edited by you continuously. You have thirty-one versions of it. It changes with your mood and it grows in the dark and you have never once had to commit to a single account of it. Romans 10 gives the mouth its own clause with its own outcome, and the Spirit put it there deliberately rather than for rhythm.
The moment it is spoken it becomes fixed. It has a form. It exists outside the place that keeps rearranging it.
Romans 10 gives the mouth its own clause and its own outcome, and the Spirit was in that construction on purpose, which means the speaking does something to you rather than something to His information.
You were right that it is not for Him. You were wrong that it is therefore theater.
Now the move, and it is not an argument you have lost.
Say it once, not to inform Him, but to fix it.
You keep your objection. It was correct. Nothing you say adds to what He knows and I am not going to pretend otherwise to get you to speak.
But speaking does something at your end. It takes a thing that has been edited continuously for twenty years and gives it one form, outside your head, where it cannot be revised. Romans 10 builds both clauses identically and gives the mouth its own outcome, and the Spirit put it there rather than for the sound of it, so you are not performing anything by opening it.
Romans 10 gives the mouth its own clause with its own result, and the Spirit put it there deliberately, so this has never been a performance for an audience who already knows.
Twenty years of thirty-one versions. Say the one.
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.
- Redundant, you are a good argument and you are not what the verse does. Romans 10 puts heart and mouth in two identically built clauses, each with its own outcome, and neither of them is there for rhythm.
- Thirty-one versions I have kept and edited for twenty years, you have never once had to commit to a form, and in the name of Jesus you are ended tonight. The Spirit put the mouth in that sentence on purpose and never as decoration.
- Lord, Romans 10 says it is with your mouth that you profess, and You already knew every word before I opened it. I am saying the one version out loud today, and I am going to notice how much shorter it is.
Romans 10:10
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