Five Words Or Fewer

The car park is gravel and the hall behind her is being emptied of chairs, that particular clatter, somebody stacking them eight high because ten falls over.

She is sitting in the driver's seat with the door open and one foot still on the gravel, because it is warm out and she has not decided to go home yet.

On the passenger seat there is a folded sheet of paper with a staple in the corner.

Two pages. Nineteen numbered points. She has read it twice.

Points one to four she would die for. She means that with no drama at all: if it came to it, points one to four, she would not move.

Point eleven she has never once thought about in her entire life. Not because she is shallow. Because it has genuinely never come up in forty one years of loving Jesus, and she read it and felt the way you feel when somebody asks your opinion about a person you have never met.

Point fourteen she thinks she disagrees with. And that is the one sitting on her chest, because she is not certain she is allowed to, and she cannot tell whether that uncertainty is humility or fear, and she has been sitting in this car for eleven minutes trying to work it out.

All she wanted was to help with the five year olds on a Sunday morning.

She is good with five year olds. She is the person who notices the one at the edge of the carpet. And to do that she needs to sign a page that says she holds all nineteen of these, and she cannot honestly say she does, and she is not the sort of person who signs things she cannot honestly say.

And here is the part that is not fair to anybody: the paper is not a villain.

Somebody sat up late writing that. Somebody argued about the wording of point six with real care. They wrote it because they are trying to keep five year olds safe from people who should not be near five year olds, which is exactly what she would want if it were her child on that carpet.

So there is no baddie in this car park. There is a woman with a stapled sheet, and a hall being emptied of chairs behind her, and a question that has got much bigger than the paper.

If somebody stopped her right now and said, plainly, so what do you actually stand on, what would she say.

She looks at the windscreen for a while.

Then she says four words out loud in an empty car, and her voice does something in the middle of them that she was not expecting, and she has to put her hand over her mouth.

You are the Christ.

He asked for a person

He took them a long way north, out past everything familiar, and asked them a question He already knew the answer to, which is what He does when He wants somebody to hear themselves say it.

Who do you say that I am.

Not what do you hold. Not can you affirm the following. Who do you say that I am, present tense, out loud, and there is a silence in that story that anybody who has ever been in a room where a real question landed can feel from here.

Simon Peter answered and said, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God."Matthew 16, verse 16

That is it. That is the whole answer, and it stands written that short, and His Spirit is the one who gave it to the man who said it.

It is not a summary of a longer answer he gave later. It is not point one of nineteen. It is a man naming a person to His face, and Jesus takes that one sentence and says He is going to build on it.

And Paul says the same thing from the other end, years later, to a church that is busy dividing.

For no other foundation can anyone lay than what has been laid, which is Jesus Christ.1 Corinthians 3, verse 11

Foundation. Which is a building word, and building words are worth taking literally for a minute, because you live in a building and you know exactly how they work.

Everything else is furniture.

Now hear how that is meant, because there is a cold way to hear it and it is the wrong way. Furniture is not an insult. A house with no furniture in it is not more spiritual, it is just cold, and you cannot eat in it, and nobody wants to sit down. The nineteen points are furniture, and most of them are somebody's careful, hard won, late night work, and a good chair is a genuine gift from the person who made it.

It is only that you do not stand on furniture.

You put your weight on the floor. You do it without thinking about it, all day, every day, and the only time you ever think about a floor is when you are not sure it will hold, which is what these eleven minutes in the car park have actually been about.

And here is the ache underneath all of it, the real one. A list can be added to. Somebody can always write a twentieth point. Lists have a way of getting longer, and then of separating people who were in the same room, and if the floor of your faith is a list then the floor of your faith can be extended by anybody with a printer, and you will spend your life checking whether you are still standing on it.

He does not do that to you. Scripture never has Him doing it to anybody, and His Spirit is the one who confirms the answer in a person.

The confession He built on was short enough to say in one breath, in the open air, with the wind going. It has not been extended since. It cannot be. And you can put your entire weight on it right now, without having resolved point fourteen, and it will not move under you.

Nothing here is telling you to sign the paper. Nothing here is telling you to hand it back either. That is yours, and it belongs between you and the people who wrote it, and this message does not know your hall or your Sunday morning and would not presume.

What this message knows is what is under your feet while you decide.