We Simply Went Back to the Pattern

It is nine words and Yonah has said it perhaps a hundred times.

We simply went back to the New Testament pattern.

He learned it from his father, who used it the same way, at doors and in kitchens and once on a train, and it is short and it is friendly and it ends a conversation without anybody feeling shut down.

Yonah is sixty-one. He has been an elder for twenty-two years.

And last April he was standing in somebody's front room saying it to a young couple who had walked in off the street, and the young man said, quite innocently, with real interest: back from what?

And Yonah opened his mouth and there was nothing in it.

Because the sentence has a word in it, and the word is back, and back means there was a departure, and a departure means somebody departed.

Nine words, and he has said them a hundred times, and every single one of those times the sentence has quietly said: and everybody else is what we came back from.

He did not intend that. He would like that on record and it is true. His father did not intend it either.

But it has been doing it anyway. At doors, in kitchens, once on a train, for two generations, in nine friendly words that nobody could take offense at because there is nothing on the surface to take offense at.

He said something to the young couple in the end. He does not remember what.

He remembers the drive home and he remembers not putting the radio on.

And what he has not said to anybody in sixteen months, including his wife, is: I have been claiming something in a sentence I thought was modest.

And you may have a sentence like that. Nine words, well worn, learned young, that you have never once heard from the outside.

Daniel prays we about a people he had no part in the wrong of

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it sixteen months and it was never yours to carry alone.

You are not a fraud. You never were, and a sentence learned young from a good man is not a lie you told. Scripture has a man of enormous personal integrity praying about his own people and using the first person plural throughout, and it is the Holy Spirit, not a better nine words, who makes that possible. Set it down here on this step. It is heavy and it has been in your mouth for forty years.

Now hear it, and hear the pronoun.

We have sinned and done wrong. We have been wicked and have rebelled; we have turned away from your commands and laws.Daniel 9:5

We.

Four times in one verse. And this is a man the book itself goes out of its way to present as blameless, who was carried off as a boy and who kept faith in a foreign court at real risk for a lifetime.

He is not confessing his own record. He is inside a people and he prays as one of them, and there is not one clause anywhere in that prayer that separates himself out.

And notice what that frees him to do. Because he is not defending a position, he can be completely accurate, and the prayer that follows is one of the most honest in the whole book.

You are allowed to say we and mean it. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who makes that survivable, and He has never once required a man to be personally guilty before he could pray it.

Now let me be careful here, because there are ditches on both sides and I have no intention of putting you in either.

Nothing here says your father was doing something underhanded. He was not. He had nine words that opened a door and kept a conversation warm, and he used them in good faith for a lifetime, and Scripture has no complaint about a man wanting to make a stranger comfortable.

And nothing here says the intention behind the movement was wrong. It was not. Going to the New Testament and asking what a church actually is remains a good instinct, and that instinct is why your family has a faith at all, and His Spirit was in it.

The point is only about what the sentence does when it is heard from outside, and Scripture has a blameless man praying we four times in a verse, and His Spirit is the one who holds a person while they stop defending a position.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. You did not put the radio on driving home.

That is not guilt. That is a man who has just been handed something true and does not want it covered up before he has looked at it. His Spirit was in that car and He was not accusing you, and He has never once needed you to be at fault to be teaching you something.