The Figure Before The Yes

There is a thing Cynthia believes God has been asking of her for about six years, and there is a number standing in front of it, and she has never once said the number out loud.

She has said the ask out loud. Plenty of times. To two friends, to her husband, at a table with people she trusts, and every one of them has been encouraging about it, and none of them has ever asked her the obvious question, which is what is stopping you.

If they did, she would say timing.

Timing is a good word. It is respectable, it sounds like wisdom, and it has the enormous advantage of not being a number. But underneath the word there is a figure, and the figure is precise, and she could tell you it right now to the nearest anything.

That figure is what has to be true before she would be free.

Now, she has never phrased it as a condition. Nobody does. Nobody kneels down and says, Lord, I will do this when I have that much, because a person hears themselves say a sentence like that and would not be able to finish it.

What actually happens is quieter. The ask arrives, the figure arrives about a second later without being invited, and the two of them go into the same drawer, and from then on the ask simply cannot be lifted out on its own because they have been stored together for six years.

She saw it clearly at a hall on a Saturday, watching somebody else do a smaller version of the same thing with visible joy, and thinking, quite involuntarily: she cannot afford that.

And then hearing herself.

Now, hear me before anybody starts flogging themselves, because this is exactly where the accuser would like to get a word in, and I am shutting that door right now.

Cynthia is not disobedient. She is one of the most obedient women in that building. She has done hard things when they cost her, and she is not sitting on her hands, and if you told her she lacked faith you would be wrong and you would be being cruel about a woman who has carried other people for years.

And nothing here is going to tell her to be reckless. Nothing here is going to say that a sensible person is a faithless person, because that teaching has emptied households and wrecked marriages and it has never once come from God.

The problem is not that she is careful.

The problem is that a figure has been placed in front of a yes, and it has been standing there for six years, and it has never once been examined because nobody has ever named it out loud.

You have your own version. There is something you believe you are being asked to do, and there is a condition standing in front of it, and if you are honest the condition has a number in it, and you know what the number is.

Nobody is calling you disobedient. That word does not belong to you today.

But there is a figure at the front of a queue, and it has never been asked what it is doing there.

Paul says he learned it, which means he did not start there

There is a sentence in Philippians that is quoted for comfort and that is actually a report on a long apprenticeship.

I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry.Philippians 4:12

I am instructed. He learned it. He did not have it at the beginning and he does not present it as a temperament, and the two halves of the sentence are worth noticing because everybody skips one of them.

He had to learn how to be full.

We assume the difficulty is on the hungry side. Paul puts them side by side as two things that both had to be taught, which means that having plenty has its own curriculum, and a person can fail it as easily as they can fail the other one.

And the thing he learned, as he says two verses later, is not a technique for coping. It is a location. He learned where his sufficiency comes from, and once he knew, both conditions became survivable.

And now hear what is already true over you. You are already able. Not once the figure arrives: the written word says His grace is sufficient and His strength is made perfect in weakness, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that sufficiency a felt thing in a woman standing in a hall on a Saturday.

And the yes is not waiting on your resources. The word says God is able to make all grace abound toward you, and it is He who is described as able, not you, and the Spirit is the one who carries that from being a doctrine into being a thing a person can actually stand on.

Nobody is telling you to do anything today

I am going to be extremely plain, because this is where a message like this pushes somebody into a decision that will cost their household everything, and I will not do that.

Nobody here is telling you to say yes this week. Nobody is telling you to move, resign, commit, or promise anything to anybody. I do not know your circumstances, who leans on you, what is unwell, what is unfinished, and a message that spends a family's security from a distance is not ministry.

Nobody is telling you to spend the figure, either. Not a portion of it, not any of it. There is no ask anywhere in this and there never will be on this site.

And nobody is telling you the six years were disobedience. They may have been six years of exactly the right kind of patience, and God is entirely capable of holding a thing back for reasons that have nothing to do with your bank.

What is happening here is smaller and it is only this: a condition has been sitting in front of a yes for six years, and it is coming out of the drawer and onto a table, where it can be looked at rather than obeyed.

And nothing about you is disqualified while you look at it. The word says there is now no condemnation for those in Christ, and the Spirit is the one who makes that true in a body, so a woman can name a figure out loud without bracing for what comes next.