I Can Say It To Anybody But Me

Thursday nights, forty of them, in a hall with a radiator that clanks.

She has taught that class for six years and she is good. Not showy. She takes a passage apart the way a person takes apart an engine, and she will not let anybody leave with a sentence they cannot use on a Tuesday.

Three weeks ago she taught Ephesians 1. Accepted in the Beloved. She spent forty minutes on it. She said, and she meant it, that the acceptance is not in you, it is in Him, so it does not move when you move. A woman in the second row cried. Two people told her afterward it was the most freeing thing they had heard in years.

She went home. She stood in her own kitchen with the kettle on, and she said out loud, as an experiment, I am accepted in the Beloved.

And she laughed. Not bitterly. A short, embarrassed laugh, the kind you make when somebody sends you a photograph of yourself.

She tried it once more and the laugh came again, and she made the tea and went to bed.

She can say it to anybody. She cannot say it about herself without putting something on the end of it.

If you have a truth you would defend to the death on somebody else's behalf and cannot hold on your own, you know exactly what I mean. And it is quite possible nobody has ever told you the laugh is not humility.

What you were taught to avoid is not the thing you are doing

Let me say the plain thing first, and forgive me for saying to a teacher what she teaches.

Humility was never a low estimate of yourself. It never was. Whoever handed you that handed it over meaning well, and it was wrong.

And it was not foolish of you to take it. I want to be exact, because nothing else lands until it is said. You took an instruction from people you trusted, you kept it faithfully at real cost for years, and keeping a badly worded instruction is loyalty aimed at the wrong number. There is nothing in it to be ashamed of.

Now read your own verse back, and read it as though somebody else prepared it for you, because tonight somebody has.

To the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved.Ephesians 1:6

He made us accepted. Past tense, His action, and the location of it is the whole point: in the Beloved. Not in your steadiness. Not in the quality of your teaching. Not in whether you can say it in your kitchen without laughing.

You are accepted in the Beloved right now, and the acceptance is located in Him rather than in your ability to hold it. That is not my encouragement to you. It is written in Ephesians 1:6, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a woman's ears into the place where she actually lives.

You said it yourself three weeks ago, better than I am saying it now. It does not move when you move. That was true when you said it and it did not become less true on the drive home.

So the laugh in the kitchen has not been humility. You have an acceptance that was made rather than achieved, and it did not weaken when you failed to feel it over a kettle. The word settled that before you were born, and the same Spirit who inspired it was in the kitchen with you that night.

Knowing it and receiving it are two different rooms

Here is the split, and it is worth naming precisely, because you have been treating it as hypocrisy and it is not.

You know the doctrine. You could examine on it. What you have never done is stand under it without an assignment in your hand.

Teaching is a way of holding a truth at working distance. It is honest work and God uses it, and it also happens to keep you at the front of the room rather than in the second row where the woman was crying. You have been at the front of the room for six years.

That is not pride and nobody is diagnosing you. It is a habit, and it was almost certainly built for a good reason a long time ago.

But notice what it costs. Forty people have that sentence in their hands because of you. You are the only person in the building who does not.

You have a place inside that grace that was never opened by understanding it, and it stays open on nights when the sentence sounds absurd to you. Ephesians 1 says He made us accepted in the Beloved; His Spirit is the one who takes a doctrine a woman can teach and puts it somewhere she cannot argue with it.

One plain word before we go on, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If part of the reason you cannot say it about yourself is that somebody near you punishes you for taking up space, nothing here is telling you to absorb that. Reaching for help is not a failure of humility, and in the United States 988 answers by call or text at any hour.