It Is Out Before I Decide

The last one was about a fish.

He had not caught it. He had been out with two other men and one of them had caught it and it was a good one, and later in the week somebody at church asked him how the fishing had been, and he heard his own voice say "yeah, got a nice one Saturday," and it was out and gone before any part of him had convened a meeting about it.

Nobody will ever check. Nobody cares. There is no fish in this story that matters.

What matters is the four-tenths of a second.

Because he did not decide to say it. That is the thing he cannot get past and has never been able to explain to anybody, including his wife, who is the only person he would ever try to explain it to. There was no moment of choosing. There was a question, and there was a sentence, and the sentence was already in the room while some slower part of him was still standing at the back thinking no, hang on.

It is always small. That is the pattern. It is never money and it is never anything that would hurt somebody. It is a fish, or how long a job took, or whether he had already read something, or that he was on his way when he was in fact still at home.

He is thirty-six. He has been aware of it since he was about eleven, watching himself do it in a schoolyard and thinking, even then, why did I say that.

And the thing that has changed recently, and the reason it has come up at all, is that his eldest is nine, and last month, at a table, in front of two other families, his son said something about a bike that was not true, in about four-tenths of a second, in a voice that he recognized completely.

He did not say anything to the boy. He has not been able to work out what he would even say.

You are not being asked to get faster

I want to start with the thing you have been trying, because I think you should stop trying it and I want to say why.

You have been trying to get to the sentence before it leaves. To insert a decision into four-tenths of a second, reliably, forever, by concentrating. And it works sometimes, on days when you are rested and the room is easy, and it does not work on the other days, and after twenty-five years that pattern has taught you something about yourself that is not true.

It has taught you that the fast one is you and the slow one is the effort.

That is exactly backwards, and Scripture says so in a place that people usually read as an instruction and is actually a description.

And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.Ephesians 4:24

Read what has already happened in that sentence before you get to your part. The new man is created. Past tense, done, by God, after His own likeness, in righteousness and true holiness. He is finished. He exists. Nobody is asking you to build him at speed in a doorway.

Put on is the language of clothing, and what you put on is a thing that is already made and already yours and is hanging there whether or not you reached for it this morning.

You have a new man, already created, already righteous, already holy, and that is not encouragement for a man with a fast mouth, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing on the twenty-five years rather than on your understanding of Ephesians.

Now let me name the reflex accurately, because I do not think you ever have.

A four-tenths-of-a-second answer is not a moral position. It is a piece of machinery installed in a schoolyard by a boy who found that a small adjustment made a room easier, and who was right, and whose nervous system filed that as useful and has been offering it ever since like a dog bringing a stick.

You are not a liar with a good act. You are a man carrying an old and very fast piece of equipment, and Scripture puts the new man's existence entirely outside your reaction time, and the Spirit of God has been in you long enough that you have been convicted about a fish for a week, which is not the behavior of a hardened man.

I want to say something about your son, because I think that is why you are actually reading this.

You saw it, at a table, in front of two other families, and you recognized the voice, and you have not been able to work out what to say.

Here is what I will say about that and then I will leave it alone, because he is yours and not mine. You are not passing on a nature. The word says the new man is created by God, and the Spirit is the one who makes him fit, and a boy who says something quick about a bike at nine is not receiving an inheritance he cannot escape. He is nine, and he is doing what his father did at eleven, and neither of those facts is a life sentence.

And here is the last of it. You are already dressed in a man who does not need the four-tenths of a second. Not one you are building. One that was made, after God, in righteousness and true holiness, and that has been hanging in this house the whole time you have been trying to outrun your own mouth.