I Only Pray Other People's Words

He has a book. It is small and it is soft at the corners and it lives in the drawer of the table beside the bed, and there are seven pages turned down.

Some of them are very old. One of them is from a woman who lived four hundred years ago. Two of them are from a man he has never heard anybody else mention. One of them is the one everybody knows, and he uses that one when he is too tired to find any of the others.

He reads them out loud. Every night, and most mornings, and he means every word of every one of them.

He has not prayed a sentence of his own since he was twenty-nine.

He is forty-six. It stopped on a particular evening and he could take you to the chair. He had been trying to say something to God about a thing that had happened, and he got about four words in, and the four words came out of his mouth and hung in the air of that room and he heard them.

And what he heard was a man saying something he had no right to say.

Not because the words were wrong. They were perfectly ordinary words that anybody might use. It was that they were his, in his own voice, out of his own mouth, and given what he had done, they sounded to him like a lie being told in the room.

So he stopped. And within about two weeks he had found the book, and the book was a mercy and he would say so, because the book gave him a way to keep going.

Seventeen years.

His wife prays out loud with him at night and does not know that one of them is reading. His children think their father is a man of few but well-chosen words, which is true in a way that would take an hour to explain.

And underneath it all there is a sentence he has never said, which is: these are the only words in this house that are clean enough to say out loud.

Nobody is taking the book off you

Let me say something about the book before anything else, because I do not want you defending it while I am talking.

Nobody is taking it off you. It is not a crutch and it is not a substitute and I am not going to tell you that praying somebody else's words is a lesser form of anything. The church has done exactly that for two thousand years, and the woman from four hundred years ago wrote hers so that somebody like you could use it, and she would be glad.

The book is a mercy. You said so yourself and you were right.

What we are looking at is not the book. It is the sentence underneath it.

These are the only words in this house that are clean enough to say out loud.

That sentence is doing something very specific and it is worth naming precisely: it makes the cleanliness of the words the qualification, and it makes you the only unclean thing in the room. And once that is in place, borrowed language is not devotion any more. It is a workaround, and you have been running it for seventeen years.

Now here is what Scripture says about the arithmetic you have been doing.

Moreover the law entered, that the offence might abound. But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.Romans 5:20

Look at the comparison, because Paul chose it carefully. He does not say grace was sufficient. He does not say grace was equal to it. He says much more abound, and the word is one of the strongest available: it means to superabound, to overflow beyond any measure being used.

The whole verse is built as a competition that grace wins by a distance that Paul cannot express in ordinary language.

You are somebody over whom grace has much more abounded, and that is not encouragement for a man with a soft-cornered book, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing on the chair in that room rather than on your general understanding of Romans 5.

Now let me go at the four words.

You said something to God, in your own voice, and you heard it, and it sounded like a lie being told in the room.

I want to suggest what was actually happening in that moment, and you can weigh it. A man who has done a thing and knows it and is not making excuses is a man whose conscience is working exactly as designed. What you heard was not God's assessment of your right to speak. It was your own conscience, operating correctly, at full volume, in a quiet room, four words into a sentence.

And a working conscience is a very good thing to have and a very bad thing to take instructions from about your standing.

You have every right to say your own words to God, and Scripture puts the abounding on grace's side by a margin, and the Spirit of God has been in you through seventeen years of somebody else's sentences, praying alongside you every night while you read.

I want to say something about your wife, too, since she is in the room.

She prays out loud with you and does not know one of you is reading. You have kept a marriage's prayer life going for seventeen years from a book in a drawer, and God has heard every one of those evenings, and He was never grading the authorship.

And here is the last of it. You are permitted your own voice, tonight, exactly as you are. The word says grace did much more abound, and the Spirit is the seal on that, and the four words that hung in the air of that room seventeen years ago were not too dirty to say. They were just the first ones you had said in a while.

And if what is on you tonight is heavier than shame, if it has got as far as not wanting to be here at all, please tell one human being tonight. A doctor, a crisis line in your own country, one person who can sit with you. That is not a detour from any of this. It is part of it, and you are worth the phone call.