The Touchline on a Saturday

Frost still on the far half of the pitch. Fourteen small children in bibs running toward one ball like water toward a drain, and the coach shouting spread out the way he shouts it every week to no effect. He has the flask, the fold-out chair he never unfolds, and his daughter is the one in the yellow boots who stops mid-run to look at a bird.

Then it comes. Not the sentence yet. The pull. It arrives the way it always arrives, without knocking, out of a Saturday morning with nothing wrong in it, and it is the old thing, the exact old thing, as strong as it ever was. He does not move. The other parents are talking about the fixture list. Somebody's dog is off its lead. And he stands there with the flask in his hand and it goes through him from the top down, and nobody on the touchline knows.

Then the sentence, right behind it, quiet, reasonable, the one that does more damage than the pull ever did: If I were really His, I would not still want this as much as I do.

And this is you. On a touchline, or in an elevator, or in the middle of a conversation about somebody's kitchen extension. The pull comes and you can bear the pull. What you cannot bear is what the pull seems to prove: that the thing God supposedly did in you was not done, or was done to somebody else, or wore off, because surely a person who was set apart would not still feel this at nine on a Saturday with the frost still on the grass. You have never told anyone that sentence. You have been living under it for years.

The oldest sentence in the world

Say the pit first. The wanting is real and it is strong and it has not gone. Nobody is going to tell you it should have gone by now, or that a person further along would not feel it. I am not going to describe it and I am not going to weigh it against anybody else's, because the size of a pull says nothing at all about the standing of the person it pulls on. That is the whole of this message and I will say it plainly again before the end.

Now the sentence. If I were really His. Listen to where it was first said. Jesus stood in the river, the Spirit came down on Him, and a voice came out of heaven and said, This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased (Matthew 3:17). That was settled, out loud, by the Father. And in the very next chapter, the first words the tempter said to Him were: If you are the Son of God (Matthew 4:3).

Read that again. The Father had just said this is my Son. The tempter's opening move was if you are. He said it twice more. He did not lead with the bread or the height of the temple. He led with the doubt about belonging, because he knew that if he could get the if to stick, everything else would follow, and he knew it would not stick if the Son answered from what had been spoken over Him rather than from what He was feeling in a desert after forty days.

You are His, and the sentence that says otherwise is not yours and never was. I am not softening the pull. I am telling you where the if comes from, and it is written down: it is the tempter's oldest line, spoken to God's own Son on the far side of the Father's own voice. The Holy Spirit is the one who spoke over you what the Father spoke over Him, and the Spirit does not withdraw a word because a Saturday morning got hard.

Tempted in every way, and holy the whole time

Here is the line that undoes the sentence at the root, and it is about Jesus before it is about you:

For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.Hebrews 4:15

Tempted in every respect. Not lightly. Not in theory. In every respect, as we are. And yet without sin. Hold those two halves together and look at what falls out of them: the pull and the sin are two different things. He felt the whole weight of the first and never once did the second, and He was holy the entire time, the most set-apart person who ever stood on this earth, and He was tempted while He was.

So the wanting is not the verdict. If it were, the Son of God would have been unmade in the wilderness, and He was not. He came out of it holy, having wanted bread as much as any starving man ever wanted it. The pull did not unmake what the Father said. It could not. Wanting has never once, anywhere in Scripture, been the same thing as belonging somewhere else.

You have a high priest who knows the exact weight of your Saturday morning, and He was holy under it, and you are His in the middle of yours. This is not my encouragement; it is written, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes it hold in you when the pull is going through you from the top down. He was tempted and set apart in the same hour. So are you. Both, on the touchline, at once.

What is set apart here

This site keeps saying that holiness is something God did before it is anything you do, and it is time to say what He set apart in this article. Not the wanting; nobody consecrates that. What He set apart is the hour the pull arrives in. The Saturday morning, the flask, the yellow boots, the ten seconds when it goes through you and nobody sees. That hour belongs to Him. He did not set apart the easy hours and leave the hard ones to fend for themselves. He set apart the man standing in it, and so the hour is His ground, and the pull is a trespasser on it and not the owner.

Which is why the smallest thing is asked of you, and it is not to feel less. Jesus said faith the weight of a seed, spoken, moves a mountain (Matthew 17:20). Spoken. The mountain here is not the pull; you have been trying to move that for years and this is not that fight. The mountain is the sentence behind it, the if I were really His, and it moves when it is spoken to, and it is spoken to on the touchline, in the ten seconds, not afterwards in the car.

You were given words to say at the moment of the pull, and they are not a spell, they are an agreement with what was already spoken over you. Scripture is the ground: the beloved Son heard if you are and answered from what was written. And the Holy Spirit is the current in the words, not the intensity of your resistance. He who was tempted is able to help those who are being tempted (Hebrews 2:18). Able. Present tense. On a Saturday.