He could do it once. That is what nobody understands about his situation, including two people who have tried to encourage him.
If this were one Sunday, he would already have done it. He has been in enough hard rooms to know what a single hard hour costs and he can pay that. He has paid it before. There is a version of courage that is a sprint, and he has run it, and he is not afraid of it.
This is not that.
What he is holding is a position he believes to be true, on a matter that is not going away, in a community where the disagreement will still be live in six years. If he sets it out, then he sets it out on a Sunday, and then there is a Monday, and then there is an every-week-after in which he is the man who said that.
He has done the arithmetic in a way that most encouragement never gets near.
It is not one conversation, it is about ninety over three years. It is not one awkward hour, it is a permanent slight recalibration in a hundred and forty relationships. It is being the person a new family is quietly told about in their second month. It is going to funerals for the next fifteen years where somebody in the second row is thinking about it.
He said to himself in his study, out loud, in the spring: I have got one brave day in me and this needs six thousand ordinary ones.
And what that produced was not fear. It was something flatter and worse, which is a kind of anticipatory exhaustion. He is tired in advance. He is tired of years that have not happened yet, and he has begun to suspect that a man who is exhausted by a future is not going to be much use in it.
The word is remaining under
There is a passage in Hebrews about running that is not really about speed at all, and the word at the center of it is worth knowing properly.
Let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.Hebrews 12:1-2
The word behind patience is not the English word patience. It means remaining under. Staying beneath a weight rather than getting out from under it, over time, without collapse. It is not about waiting pleasantly. It is a load bearing word.
Which means the writer already knows what you know. He is not describing a sprint and he is not encouraging anybody about a single brave hour. He is talking about the exact thing you have been calculating: staying under something for a long time.
So hear this, sitting in a study in the spring: what you are looking at is the thing Scripture is actually about, and you have not misunderstood the assignment. That is not my flattery; it is what the word in that verse means, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes a Greek term and makes it a floor a tired man can stand on.
Now here is the next verse and it is the one written for you specifically.
For consider him that endured such contradiction of sinners against himself, lest ye be wearied and faint in your minds.
Read the reason clause at the end. Lest ye be wearied and faint in your minds. The writer names the exact failure mode you have already begun to experience, and he names it as a mind thing rather than a body thing, and he addresses it as the ordinary expected danger of a long stretch rather than as a defect in the person.
And then read what he prescribes for it. Consider him.
Not: try harder. Not: find more resolve. Not: shorten the race. A looking. The remedy offered for anticipatory exhaustion in a long obedience is to turn and look at somebody who went through a long contradiction, and to keep looking.
You are not disqualified by being tired in advance. His word treats weariness of mind as the expected hazard and prescribes a direction of gaze rather than an increase of effort, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who has been telling you that a man exhausted by a future is unfit for it.
And here is the thing about your arithmetic, and I want to say it carefully because your arithmetic is not wrong.
Ninety conversations over three years is probably about right. What is wrong is that you have been asked to carry all ninety tonight, in a study, in one sitting, and no grace has ever been issued on that schedule. It comes daily. It has always come daily. The six thousand ordinary days each come with their own supply and not one of them has arrived yet.
I am not telling you to say it. There is no line coming where holding this makes you a coward, and you may carry it another five years and be entirely right with God.
You have not been asked to carry six years tonight.
That is the source of the exhaustion, and it is worth naming exactly, because it is not the future that is heavy. The future is not here. What is heavy is the whole of it compressed into one evening in a study, which is a weight nobody has ever been given grace for, because grace is not issued in bulk.
And the tiredness in advance is not a disqualification. Hebrews names it as the expected danger of a long stretch, and it prescribes a looking rather than a lifting, and it does that because the writer knew perfectly well that no amount of resolve gets a person through eleven thousand of anything.
Whatever you decide about that Sunday, tonight there is a single day on you, and it is nearly over.
You have one day on you and not a decade, and you are not required to carry the years in advance. It is written, consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted (Hebrews 12:3), where the instruction is to look at Him rather than at the road. The Holy Spirit is the One who makes considering Him a thing that actually holds a man up on a Thursday night.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, with your hand where it is. Not one line here is my idea about you. Every one of them stands on His word, and it is the Holy Spirit and never the wording who makes a spoken sentence land in a person. The authority in them was given to you by Christ, who is in you, and it does not run out when you do. Speak to the thing, not about the people, and never against them. And whatever He does with the years ahead, He does in His own way and His own time.
- Six years I cannot picture, you are not mine to carry all at once and I am not being asked to. Hebrews 12 says run with patience, and the word there means remaining under a weight over time, so Scripture already knows the shape of what I am looking at.
- Exhaustion that arrived from years which have not happened yet, in the name of Jesus you are put out of this study. The writer names weariness of mind as the expected hazard of a long stretch and prescribes a looking, and never once an increase of effort.
- God, You are the One who endured such contradiction, and the word says consider him rather than try harder. Your Spirit issues the supply daily and has never once handed anybody six thousand days in a single evening, and tonight there is a single day on me and it is nearly over.
Hebrews 12:3
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