The Line That Waited at the Sink

For the believer who finally meant it on a Tuesday, over the washing up, years late.

It is twenty past nine on a Tuesday, and there are four plates and a roasting tin still to do.

Nothing has happened today. That's worth saying, because we tend to expect these moments to arrive with weather attached. There was no crisis, no bad news, no sermon that landed. There was a normal day at work, a normal drive, a normal meal, and now there is a sink.

He's washing up with the radio off, which is unusual, and somewhere between the plates and the tin a line surfaces in him. One of the old ones. He's said it several hundred times in a building on a Sunday.

Standing there with his hands in the water, he says it out loud, to nobody, and finds that he means it.

Not more than he meant it before. For the first time. He has said that sentence since he was a boy, and this is the first occasion on which he has actually agreed with it. It has happened over a roasting tin, on an ordinary Tuesday, in a kitchen with the radio off.

You are able to mean the old words, and the day it happens does not have to be a significant one. The written Word ties believing in the heart to confession in the mouth without a word about the setting, and the Holy Spirit is the one joining them wherever you happen to be standing.

Why We Wait for a Better Moment

Here's what he'd assumed, without ever putting it into words.

Meaning it properly was going to require the right conditions. A quiet church, perhaps, or a hard week that broke something open, or one of those evenings when the music does its work and the room goes still. Somewhere with atmosphere. Somewhere that deserved it.

So he'd spent years on a low, patient wait for an occasion, and the occasions kept coming and going without delivering. Christmas services. A funeral. A weekend away where everybody cried on the Saturday night. He'd felt plenty in all of them and agreed with nothing.

You know that wait. It isn't a lack of seriousness, and it certainly isn't unbelief. It's the reasonable assumption of somebody who has been told, mostly by accident, that the important interior events arrive on the important days.

Heart and Mouth, With No Setting Attached

Here's the verse, in the half that gets quoted less often:

For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.Romans 10:10 (KJV)

Read it for staging. There isn't any. No building, no gathering, no hour of the day, no emotional condition you're required to be in before either half counts.

Heart and mouth. That's the entire apparatus, and both of them travel with you into a kitchen. A man at a sink has everything the sentence asks for, which is presumably why it was written without conditions on it.

You carry everything that verse requires into every room you walk into. The written Word names only the heart and the mouth, with no setting attached to either, and the Holy Spirit is the one joining those two in you today.

The Words Were Never Waiting on the Weather

Here's what I'd carry out of that kitchen if I could take a single thing away with me.

We imagine the old sentences as slightly impatient. As though they've been standing at the front of a room for thirty years waiting for you to catch up, tapping a foot, disappointed by the Tuesdays.

They haven't. A true sentence has no schedule. It was true in every one of those Christmas services where he felt a great deal and agreed with nothing. It was true on the drive home. It was true over the plates long before it was ever true in his mouth.

Here's what nobody says plainly enough about these words. They aren't waiting for you to be ready. They're simply true. One day your hands are in the water and you find you agree with them, and the sentence itself hasn't changed by a syllable.

The words have been true through every occasion you thought you'd wasted. The written Word states them without conditions attached, and the Holy Spirit is the one who eventually brings your agreement up alongside them.

Nothing Here Is a Verdict on Your Sundays

Let me be plain, because there's a version of this message that would do harm and I won't write it.

The Sundays you sat through without arriving at anything were not wasted, and the people who led them were not failing you. Most of what's ever settled in a person settles slowly, underneath, without a single detectable event, and a kitchen on a Tuesday is usually the surfacing rather than the cause.

I'm also not saying the old words are binding, or that a believer in a room that's never recited a line of them is missing anything. The faith is the same in a building that says them and in one that doesn't.

You can count every unremarkable Sunday as part of it rather than against it. Scripture puts no conditions on the heart or the mouth, and the Holy Spirit does the bringing rather than the grading.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

Written by Caleb This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.