Believed Or Faithful

Yvette prayed a sentence for eleven years and only last winter noticed that it contained two entirely different requests.

The sentence was simple. Lord, let them hear it.

She has prayed it before meetings, in cars, in the ten seconds before speaking, and it has always felt like the obvious prayer for somebody in her position, and it is the prayer she would have advised anybody else in her position to pray.

What she noticed, and she noticed it because of a completely unrelated conversation with a young woman about something else, is that let them hear it is not one request.

There is the thing itself: that what is true would be received and acted on, for their sake, because it would go better for them if it were.

And there is the other one, sitting inside the same six words, which is: let me not be dismissed again.

Both are in there. Both are honest. And she has been praying them as though they were one thing for eleven years, which means she has never once been able to tell which of the two was doing the steering.

She sat with that for most of a winter.

Because here is what she found when she pulled them apart. The first request is genuinely about them, and it is a good prayer, and God can do as He likes with it.

The second one is about her, and it is not shameful, and it is also not something anybody has ever been promised.

You have your own version. There is a prayer you say before speaking, or a hope you carry into a room, and you have never separated the two things inside it.

Nobody here is going to tell you the second one is unworthy. It is not. But it has been steering, and it is worth knowing which hand is on the wheel.

The standard is one word and it is not the word you would choose

There is a sentence Paul writes about people entrusted with things, and the whole weight of it lands on a single requirement.

Moreover it is required in stewards, that a man be found faithful.1 Corinthians 4:2

Found faithful.

Not found persuasive. Not found effective, not found vindicated, not found agreed with, and not found successful in producing any particular response in anybody. Faithful.

And the surrounding verses make it sharper still. He goes on to say that it is a very small thing with him to be judged of any man, and that he does not even judge himself, and that the one who judges him is the Lord.

That is a man deliberately removing three separate courts from the process: theirs, his own, and public opinion. What is left is the only one that was ever going to give a verdict.

And you are being asked for one thing and it is on your side of the table. That is not my simplification: the written word names faithfulness as the whole requirement for a steward and stops there, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman who has spent eleven years asking for a second thing without noticing.

And the outcome was never in your keeping. The word says Paul planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase, and the giving is His verb in that sentence, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a genuine handover rather than a form of humility somebody performs.

Why the two get fused, and why it is not vanity

Now let me be fair to Yvette and to you, because it would be easy to file this under pride and it does not belong there.

The two requests fuse because in practice they arrive together. When a room receives something true, the person who said it is also, at the same moment, believed. You cannot have the first without the second, and so a person praying honestly for the first has been receiving the second as a by-product for years and has never had to examine it.

It is only when the first stops arriving that they come apart.

And then the second one stands there on its own, exposed, and looks like vanity, and the person feels ashamed of a thing that was invisible while everything was working.

That is not vanity. That is a normal human want that was being met incidentally and is now unmet and visible, and it is the ordinary condition of anybody who has been unheeded for a stretch.

And the wanting is not a failure in you. The word says hope deferred maketh the heart sick, and names it as a condition rather than a fault, and the Spirit is the one who makes that distinction land in somebody who has been quietly ashamed since the winter.

And you have not been praying wrongly for eleven years. The word says the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered, and for us means He has been in every one of those car park prayers, sorting what you could not sort, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a comfort rather than a correction.

What changes when they come apart

Practically, three things change, and they are all quiet.

The first is that you can pray the first one cleanly. Let them hear it, for their sake. And you can mean it, and you can leave it entirely with Him, because it was always His.

The second is that you can name the other one honestly, to God, without dressing it up. I would like not to be dismissed again. That is a true sentence and He is not shocked by it and it does not need to be prayed as a request. Naming it is enough.

The third is that the room stops being a court. If being believed is not the standard, then a room that does not believe you has not delivered a verdict on you, because it was never sitting as a judge in the first place.

And no room has ever been your judge. The word says it is a very small thing to be judged of man's judgment, and He that judgeth me is the Lord, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a real relocation rather than a brave sentence.