She Can Teach It and Has Not Asked

The hall has that particular after sound. The urn ticking as it cools, one strip light with a buzz in it, and the chairs half cleared, some stacked by the door and some still in the ring where people left them when they stood up.

She was good tonight. She knows she was good, and she is allowed to know it.

Somebody had asked the question she loves, the one about what the word actually means, and she did the thing she always does. She did not reach for a dictionary. She told them about a field. A man in a hard year lets go of a field that has been his family's since before anybody can remember, and the field is gone, properly gone, and he has no way on earth to get it back. And the law God gave says his nearest relative comes, the one near enough by blood to have the right, and takes the field back for him, and it goes home to the family it belonged to. That is the word. Somebody near enough to have the right, willing to use it, acting for a person who cannot act for himself.

The room went quiet in the good way. A man near the back said, so it is not that God overlooked it, it is that somebody else went and got the field. And she said yes. Exactly that. And you could feel it land in about nine people at once.

The young man stayed behind to ask a follow up, standing in his coat with his bag on his shoulder for eleven minutes, and she answered every part of it, and he went off down the corridor saying thanks about four times.

So now it is her and the urn and the buzzing light and about thirty chairs.

And she is stacking them, four at a time, and the question comes up out of nowhere the way they do when your hands are busy.

She could tell you what she was redeemed out of. She could give you the years, and the shape of it, and roughly what it cost her, and she could do it calmly now, which took a long time. One sentence. She has said that sentence out loud in rooms and helped people with it.

She has no sentence at all for the other half. Not a bad one. Not a vague one. None. She has never once, in all these years, sat down and asked what she was redeemed for.

She stands there with four chairs against her hip and thinks: I have been teaching the first half of a sentence for eleven years.

The strip light buzzes. The urn ticks. She puts the chairs down by the door and does not stack them, and goes and sits in the ring on one of the ones nobody moved.

And you know that hall. You might be the person everybody asks. You might have the whole thing straight, better than the people who preach it, and you could say tonight exactly what you were brought out of, with the dates. And the other half of the sentence has been sitting there unasked for so long that it has stopped feeling like an omission and started feeling like the way things are.

The sentence has two halves

Every time Scripture uses this word it points forwards. Every single time. Out of, and then into. From, and then for. Nobody in that Book is ever bought back and left standing in the doorway.

You have been brought out of something and into something, and only one half of that has ever been read to you. Scripture says you were set free from sin and became slaves of God, and the fruit you get leads to sanctification, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the force of my sentence, who carries that into a hall with the urn ticking.

But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.Romans 6:22

Look at where the verb is going. Set free from, and then the sentence keeps moving: become, fruit, leads to, and its end. Paul cannot say the word freedom without the sentence traveling somewhere. He does not stop at the gate and admire it. The whole grammar leans forward, and half of it has been missing from your mouth for years.

And I want to be careful here, because this is the exact place people get hurt. What is ahead of you is not the bill arriving. Purpose on this site is never repayment, and nothing in that verse is God quietly opening an account now that the rescuing part is over. The fruit is not a payment. The fruit is what a living thing does when it is finally in the ground it was made for.

You are not on the far side of a favor, and there is nothing being expected back from you. It is written that we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand (Ephesians 2:10), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes prepared beforehand mean waiting for you rather than owing to Him.

What you were bought for

Here is why I think it has stayed unasked all these years, and it is not laziness and it is not lack of faith.

The first half of the sentence is safe. It is behind you, it is finished, it has a date on it, and you can hand it to somebody else in a hall on a Tuesday and watch it help them. The second half is not safe at all, because it is ahead of you, and it has your name in it, and asking it out loud means finding out that God has an opinion about the rest of your life.

So you have become extremely good at the half you can carry for other people. And you have been quietly certain, without ever putting it in words, that the forward half belongs to the people you teach and not to you. That the ones with the shape ahead of them are the ones who did not lose what you lost.

You are not the exception in your own teaching, and the second half was never for other people only. His word says He has plans for you, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope (Jeremiah 29:11), and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets you hear that in your own name for once instead of quoting it to somebody in a coat.

Now the honest half, because this site does not tidy anything away. What you came out of happened. It is in the record and the record stands, and the years have a shape you can still describe calmly in a hall. Nothing about the second half of the sentence deletes the first half; you will still be able to tell it, and it will still help people.

The record stands. The verdict is changed. And the sentence keeps going after the verdict, which is the part nobody told you.

You have a forward half, and it is not a reward for having explained the backward half well enough. Scripture says it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure (Philippians 2:13), and it is the Holy Spirit who does the working rather than the assessing.

And here is the specific thing being handed back tonight, and it is small enough to hold. Not your purpose in general, and not a plan for your life dropped on you in a cold hall. It is your own question. The forward one. Given back to you as a thing you are allowed to ask about yourself, out loud, tonight, without being thought greedy for asking.

You are permitted to ask what you were bought for, and asking it is not presumption. It is written that you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but the Spirit of adoption (Romans 8:15), and a child is allowed to ask her Father what the rest of the day is for.