Twenty Minutes Before the Sermon

The study has a clock on the wall that he has never liked, and it says twenty minutes past nine, and he goes up at ten.

Everything is done. The notes are in order and he has been over the turn in the middle four times and he knows where he is going to slow down and where he is going to stop talking altogether for a second. He is not nervous. He has been doing this for nineteen years and the nerves went somewhere around year six.

He is praying, in the loose way a man prays when everything is ready and there is nothing to do but wait.

And then something surfaces.

We are not going to describe it and I am not going to ask you what yours is. It surfaces. It was not summoned by anything he was doing or thinking, and it arrives the way these things arrive, which is sideways and whole and out of nowhere, in a study, with a clock on the wall, nineteen minutes before he stands up in front of four hundred people and opens the Bible.

And here is what takes four seconds, which is the actual subject of this article.

Fraud.

Not as a fear. Not as a question. As a conclusion, arrived at instantly, with the full weight of something proven: whatever else is true about me, that just happened in my head, and therefore I have no business going up those steps, and everybody out there is about to be listened to by a man who is not what they think he is.

Nineteen minutes.

He has been here before. He has been here more often than anybody in that building would ever guess, and he has never told one living soul, and the reason he has never told anybody is that the conclusion feels less like an accusation and more like a fact that a decent man would not need to be told twice.

And you know that study. Something arrives in your head that you did not choose and cannot get out, and within a few seconds you have reached a verdict about yourself, and the verdict does not feel like a verdict, it feels like clarity.

So hear this before we go one step further, because the clock is running and I think you have already braced for agreement. You are not disqualified by what surfaces in you and you never were. Romans 7:20 has Paul drawing that exact line about his own inside life, in the first person, in a letter God saw fit to keep, and the Holy Spirit is in this study with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

The picture is an escort, not an execution

There is a verse about thoughts that gets used as a whip and is not a whip, and the whole thing turns on the picture underneath the words.

Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.2 Corinthians 10:5

The language is military. Paul has been building the image for several verses: strongholds, weapons, a campaign. And the word rendered bringing into captivity is what an army does with a prisoner. It takes them somewhere. To a commander.

Now look at what is not in the picture. Nothing is destroyed. Nothing is executed on the spot. There is no line here about a thought being annihilated the moment it appears, and there is no line about the appearance of one being a defeat. A prisoner taken is not a battle lost; a prisoner taken is what winning looks like.

And notice where the prisoner goes. To the obedience of Christ. Not to your judgment. Not to your assessment of what its presence proves about you. It is escorted to Him, and He is the one it answers to, and He has been dealing with prisoners of war for a very long time and is not startled by any of them.

You are not the tribunal, and every thought that arrives in you is on its way to somebody else. The written word puts the prisoner in front of Christ and never in front of the person whose head it appeared in, which means the assessment you have been running for nineteen years was never assigned to you; and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the escorting, in a study, with nineteen minutes on a clock.

Why the verdict feels like clarity

I want to name why this lands so hard on a man who is about to preach, because if I pretend a mature believer should be past it you will read your own difficulty as failure, and it is not.

The verdict feels like clarity because it uses the machinery of your conscience, which is the best machinery you have. You are not a careless man. You have spent nineteen years taking seriously the gap between what a person says and what a person is, and that seriousness is a gift and it is a large part of why you are any good at this.

So when something surfaces, the accusation does not come in through the door marked temptation. It comes in through the door marked integrity, and everything in you that is honest lines up behind it immediately, and that is why it has never once occurred to you to question it. You have been agreeing with what you took to be your own conscience.

You were not weak to agree with it, and it arrived wearing the uniform of your best quality. Revelation 12:10 names the accuser of the brethren as somebody who accuses before God day and night, and the naming of a role there is worth everything: accusation is a job somebody holds, and it is not the Holy Spirit's; His Spirit convicts about what a person actually did and never about what arrived unbidden, and He does it in a way that moves toward Him rather than away.

And there is a second half. A man who never feared being a fraud would be a genuinely dangerous man to put in a pulpit. The fear is not a defect. It is the honest reflex of somebody who knows exactly how much weight those four hundred people are about to put on what he says. It is pointed at the wrong evidence, and it is not a lie about your character, it is your character misfiring.

You are not being asked to stop taking yourself seriously, and nobody is telling you to be careless with that pulpit. Psalm 103:14 says He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, which is a verse about a God who has never once expected a man to be sturdier than He made him; the same Spirit doing that remembering is the one who has walked you up those steps every Sunday for nineteen years.

And if what has been running under those Sundays is heavier than a page can hold, do not carry it alone. Find a real person this week, one outside the building if that is what it takes, who can sit with you without needing to fix a thing, and let them be somebody you do not have to be finished in front of.

What you actually have to decide in nineteen minutes

Here is the practical question, and it is smaller than the one you have been trying to answer.

You have been trying to decide whether you are a fraud. You cannot settle that in nineteen minutes, and you have never once settled it in nineteen minutes, and every Sunday you have gone up those steps carrying an unresolved case.

That is not the question in front of you. The question in front of you is whether the arrival of something in a man's head is evidence about that man, and the answer is no, and it is no in every direction, for the person in row four as well as for the person in the pulpit.

You have somewhere to send it and something to say, and both were settled before this morning. Scripture says the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty through God, which locates the power in the campaign somewhere other than in the man conducting it; the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept this study quiet enough for you to read a page instead of pacing.

So the study is not a courtroom and the clock is not a countdown to an exposure. It is twenty past nine on a Sunday, and the notes are good, and something surfaced and is on its way to Christ under escort. And in forty minutes you are going to say something true to four hundred people and it will be true whether or not the last hour was comfortable.