You Read The Promise Out Loud

She read it at half past ten on a Sunday morning, standing up, in her ordinary voice, and she heard herself do it.

Joshua chapter twenty three. Not one thing hath failed of all the good things which the LORD your God spake concerning you; all are come to pass unto you, and not one thing hath failed thereof.

It is a magnificent sentence. She chose it. Nobody put it in front of her. She had been looking for something for the anniversary service and that one came up out of her own reading and she thought, that is the one.

And she stood there and read it to a hundred and forty people and heard her own voice fill the room with it, and could not attach one syllable of it to her own life.

Not disbelieve. That is the distinction she keeps trying to make to herself and cannot quite hold. She was not standing there thinking it was untrue. She was standing there with a promise coming out of her mouth about the faithfulness of God, absolutely certain that it is true, and completely unable to run the sentence in the direction of the woman holding the Bible.

It was like reading somebody else's post out loud. The words are addressed. They are just not addressed to you and there is no way to make them be.

Afterwards a man at the back said that reading had done something for him. He said thank you twice.

And she drove home and did what she has been doing since about February, which is to conduct a small quiet inventory. She goes through what God has done for her, specifically, in the last two years, and she comes up with things, real things, and none of them will connect to the sentence she read out on Sunday. She knows they should. She can see the wire and she cannot make the current go along it.

That is not doubt. She wishes it were doubt. She would know what to do with doubt.

Look at who he asked to check

The line comes from the last speech of a very old man. It is worth knowing that before you use it, because almost nobody says it from a platform.

Joshua is at the end. He opens by saying it plainly: behold, this day I am going the way of all the earth. He is a dying man addressing the nation he led, and he is doing his final summing up, and this is what he says.

And ye know in all your hearts and in all your souls, that not one thing hath failed of all the good things which the LORD your God spake concerning you.Joshua 23:14

Now look at the first clause, because everybody quotes the second half and drops the first, and the first is the engine.

Ye know. In all your hearts and in all your souls.

He does not say: I have verified this and I am telling you. He turns the whole verification over to the room. He makes a nation of people the witness of God's record, and he says, in effect, check it yourselves, you were there, you know.

So hear this over you on the drive home. That promise is not somebody else's post. That is not my encouragement; it is what His word does with the burden of proof in Joshua 23, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes a first clause everybody skips and puts it in a woman's hands.

Now let me get at the wire that will not carry the current.

You have been trying to verify God's faithfulness from the inside, alone, in a car, by inspecting your own two years and looking for a feeling of confirmation to arrive. And it will not arrive, because that is not where the verse puts the evidence. Joshua puts it in a room full of people who watched it happen.

You are not required to feel the faithfulness of God in order to have received it. Scripture makes the record a matter of what happened rather than what registers, and the Holy Spirit is not withholding a confirmation He has decided you have not earned.

And here is the thing about the man at the back who said thank you twice.

You have filed him as evidence against yourself. He got something. You got nothing. Therefore something is wrong with you. But look at what actually took place in that building: a woman read a true word out loud and it did work in a man, which is the ordinary way this has always functioned, and the fact that she could not run the same sentence back into herself in the same ninety seconds is a fact about ninety seconds and not about her standing.

There is one more thing, and it is the tender one, so I will say it plainly. You said you go through the last two years and come up with real things that will not connect. Notice what that means. The record is intact. You are not looking at an empty page. What has gone quiet is the connecting, not the content, and a person with a full record and a quiet wire is in a completely different position from a person with nothing to point at.

You are inside that promise this morning. His word says all are come to pass and puts not one condition on the recipient's ability to feel it, and the Holy Spirit is the one holding the record steady while a woman cannot read her own handwriting.