Mine Is Four Sentences Long

They do it twice a year and Marisol has been to eleven of them.

It is a good evening. Nobody makes anybody do anything, the food is enormous, and people get up when they want to and tell what God has done.

And what people have is remarkable. There is a man who was in prison for nine years. There is a woman who lost everything twice and has a way of telling it that has the whole room silent. There is a couple who did not speak to each other for four years and now run a marriage evening in that same hall.

Twenty minutes, some of them. Nobody minds. The room is glad.

Marisol has never stood up.

Not once, in eleven of these, and she has been in that church since she was twenty-four and she is fifty-one.

Because hers is four sentences long.

She grew up in a house where God was mentioned normally. She believed it as far back as she can remember and she cannot find a moment when she did not. She has never left, never come back, never had the thing where it collapsed and got rebuilt. And the worst year of her life she got through, and she prayed the whole way, and it was not dramatic and God did not do anything anybody would put in a story.

Four sentences. Under a minute.

And what she has believed since about the fourth of these evenings is that she does not have a testimony. She has a background.

Nobody said that to her. She worked it out herself, sitting down, clapping, glad for everybody, going home.

And in the spring her niece asked her how she became a Christian, which nobody had asked in about thirty years, and Marisol heard herself say: nothing happened to me, love.

And the niece said: what, nothing?

And there was a pause of about four seconds that Marisol has thought about every week since.

And you may have four sentences. And you may have been clapping for eleven years for everybody else, quite genuinely, with your hand down.

Jesus says how the kingdom is received, and it is not by a story

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it since the fourth evening and it was never yours.

You have a testimony. You always did. Scripture has Jesus stating plainly how the kingdom is received and by whom, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the drama in anybody's account, who does the receiving in a person. Set it down here in this hall. It is heavy and you have clapped through eleven evenings holding it.

Now hear it, and hear that He is annoyed when He says it.

The disciples have been turning children away, and He is indignant, which the text says out loud, and then He says this.

Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.Mark 10:15

Receive.

Not achieve, not survive, not come back from. Receive. And the model He points at is a child, and a child's arrival into a family is famously not a story with a turning point in it. A child is simply in it, from as early as they can remember, and nobody has ever thought that made the child less of the family.

That is what you have. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who put it in you at an age you cannot recall, and He has never once graded a life by how far it had to travel.

Now let me be careful here, because there is a ditch on this side and I have no intention of putting you in it.

Nothing here says the man who did nine years or the woman who lost everything twice are performing. They are not. What God did in those lives is enormous and true and worth twenty minutes, and Scripture is full of exactly that kind of account, and the room is right to be glad.

And nothing here says a dramatic testimony is a lesser one. It is not. God rescues people out of pits on purpose and He tells them to say so, and He has used those evenings in that hall for years.

The point is only about what you concluded on your own while clapping, and Scripture says the kingdom is received like a child, and His Spirit is the one who has been doing that in you since before you can remember.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. What you told your niece was not true and you knew it in the pause.

Something did happen to you. It happened so early and so continuously that you have never been able to see the edge of it, which is not the same as it being small. His Spirit has been in it the whole time and He has never once called it a background.