I Can Recite It and I Cannot Stand On It

The girl who asked was seventeen and had been coming for about four months.

She waited until everybody else had gone, which is how you know a question is real, and she said, can I ask you something that is probably stupid? and Priya said the thing you always say, and then the girl said:

What do you actually stand on?

Not what does the church believe. She had heard that. She had heard it from Priya twice, once at the newcomers' evening and once in a small group, and both times Priya had given it beautifully, because Priya can do that. Eight points in a logical order, warm, no jargon, with the two hardest ones handled honestly rather than skated over.

The girl was asking a different question and she was asking it on purpose.

And Priya opened her mouth and began at point one.

She heard herself do it. She got about nine words in before she registered that she had reached for the framework again, and she stopped, and there was a pause that went on slightly too long, and then she said something warm and slightly evasive and they packed up the chairs.

She is thirty-three. She has been leading things for nine years.

She drove home and did the only honest thing available, which was to try it again in the car with nobody listening. Say what you stand on. Do not use the list.

She got four words out and they were all borrowed from point three.

It is not that the framework is wrong. She would defend every one of the eight points and she thinks they are true and she has watched them hold people up in hard years. It is that she has been standing on the framework, and a framework is not a floor, and she has never once had to find out what is under it because it has never given way.

And a seventeen year old asked the question that four months in the room had made obvious to her and nine years in it had made invisible to Priya.

And you may know that pause. Somebody may have asked you the real version of the question, and you may have started at point one before you knew you had.

The foundation was laid and nobody is invited to lay another

Take this off before we go any further, because you have carried it since that hall and it was never yours.

You are not a fraud for reaching for the framework. You never were. Scripture puts the laying of the foundation entirely outside anybody's hands and says so plainly, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the fluency of your eight points, who makes a person stand. Set it down here in the car. It is heavy and it has been in the passenger seat since Tuesday.

Now hear the sentence, and hear what it forbids.

For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ.1 Corinthians 3:11

Already laid.

That is written to a church that had organized itself into camps around teachers, each of them with a framework, each of them convinced. And it does not sort out which framework is best. It says the foundation is not the sort of thing anybody lays.

Which means the question the girl asked has an answer that is not point one, and it is not a shorter version of point one either. It is a Person, and He is under the eight points, and He was under them while you were giving them beautifully at the newcomers' evening.

You are standing on Him right now, at thirty-three, in a car with the engine off, before you can say it well. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who set you there, and He did not lay it provisionally.

Now let me be careful, because there is a ditch on this side and I am not putting you in it.

Nothing here says the eight points are a problem or that a church with a clear framework has lost the plot. It has not. Those points are the work of people who wanted a room full of ordinary human beings to be able to say true things in order, and they have held people up in years you have watched personally. Scripture is not against clear teaching and His Spirit has used every one of those points.

That is what good furniture does. Keep every piece of it. Teach it on Thursday.

And nothing here says fluency is suspect. It is a gift and it is a service and Scripture is not against clarity.

The point is only that fluency in the framework can substitute for footing on the floor, silently, for nine years, in the most sincere person in the building.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. What you were afraid of in that pause is not that there is nothing under the eight points.

It is that you would not know how to check, and that a seventeen year old could see the question and you could not see the answer, and a woman who has led for nine years finds that particular arrangement hard to sit with. His Spirit is not embarrassed by it and He was in the pause with you.