Say It In Your Own Words

He was asked a question in a car park and he could not answer it.

That is the whole event. Nothing dramatic happened. A man he worked with, a decent man, no agenda, walked out with him at the end of the day and said, out of nowhere and quite kindly: "You go to that church, don't you? What do you actually believe?"

And he opened his mouth and the machine started up.

He heard himself say the words. Personal relationship. Fallen. Grace not works. Accepted Him into my heart when I was eleven. Every phrase came out clean and quick and in the right order, the way your hand finds the light switch in a house you have lived in for years.

The other man nodded politely and said something about the weather and they got into their cars.

And he sat there with the key in the ignition and did not start it, because he had just heard himself from the outside, and what he had heard was fluency.

Here is the thing about him, and it matters, because it is not the story you are expecting.

He is not a hypocrite. He is not there for the networking. He has served in that place for nineteen years. He does the chairs. He carries people's names around in his chest at three in the morning. Nobody who knows him would question a thing about him.

He is simply extremely good at a language. He knows the tone. He knows which songs the room lifts on and which stories get told at which point in a talk. He knows when to say just in a prayer. He absorbed a culture at eleven years old and has spoken it fluently ever since, and it has been so long that he genuinely cannot tell, sitting in that car park at half past five, which parts of him are conviction and which parts are accent.

And the frightening thought, the one that made him put both hands on the wheel, was not I do not believe.

It was: I would have no way of knowing.

There is something underneath, and it can be found

Now hear me, because the first thing I have to do is take the panic out of this.

That question in the car park is not a sign that your faith is fake. It is a sign that you are awake. A man who has never once wondered whether his beliefs are his own has not achieved certainty, he has just never been asked in a car park by somebody with no agenda. Scripture is not frightened of that question, and His Spirit is often the one who raises it.

And I am not going to spend one line mocking the culture you learned it in. I have heard people do that and it is cheap, and it is usually done by somebody who owes far more to it than they will admit. The songs are not the enemy. The phrases were not invented to trap you. Most of them started life as somebody's real, hot, first-time way of saying an actual thing, and they only went smooth from being handled by a great many hands.

Belonging is not a sin. You are allowed to love your people. Scripture is full of people held up by their own room, and His Spirit has always worked in rooms like that.

The only question tonight is whether there is something underneath it that would still be there if the accent went.

And I will tell you where to look, because Scripture shows you a man in a prison cell with the entire culture stripped off him.

I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that He is able to guard what I have entrusted to Him for that day.2 Timothy 1:12

Look at how little that sentence needs.

No vocabulary. No room. No music, no crowd, no phrases, nothing to belong to. A cold cell, a man near the end of his life, and one thing that survived the removal of absolutely everything else.

And it is not I know what I believe. Read it again. It is I know whom.

That is your test, and it is a mercy of a test, because it is not an exam on doctrine. You are not being asked to defend anything in a car park. You are being asked whether there is a whom under there. That is the written word's own question, and His Spirit is the one who answers it.

Because doctrine can be inherited. Vocabulary can be absorbed at eleven and carried for life. A Person cannot be absorbed. Either you have some dealings with Him or you do not, and the way to find out is not to interrogate yourself in a car with the key in the ignition.

The way to find out is to try to say one true thing without the usual words.