You Can Lead It And You Cannot Raise It

Sunday morning she can take a room of eight hundred people from flat to their feet in about four minutes, and she has done it so many times she could describe the mechanics.

It is not manipulation. She would be genuinely offended at that and she would be right to be. She means every syllable. Something happens in her when that room lifts and it is the realest thing in her week.

Monday morning she stands in her own kitchen and cannot raise a thing.

Not depression. She has looked at that, honestly, and it is not what this is. Her sleep is fine and she eats and she laughs.

It is that there is a switch in her that eight hundred people flip, and she cannot reach it on her own. Alone, at the sink, with the radio off, she has nothing. She can put music on and she does, and she sings along, and it is like singing along.

She has never said this to anybody, and she has thought a number of things about it over about three years, and the one that has stuck is the worst one.

Maybe it is the room and not God.

That is the sentence. Not that she is a fraud, because she is not and she knows it. Something worse and quieter: that the thing she has felt on a Sunday for fifteen years might turn out to be eight hundred people and a good band, and that God has very little to do with any of it.

He commanded his own glory to wake up

David is in a cave, hiding from a man who wants him dead, and in the middle of that psalm he says something that is not a request.

Awake up, my glory; awake, psaltery and harp: I myself will awake early.Psalm 57:8

Take that at the sink. You are able to command your own soul with nothing to help you. The word has David saying, Awake up, my glory, in a cave, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the waking, which was never a room and never a band.

Awake up, my glory.

That is a command and it is addressed to himself. His glory means the part of him that praises, the interior thing that is supposed to rise, and he is talking to it directly because it is not currently doing anything.

He is in a cave. There is no room. There are no eight hundred people. There is no band and no volume and no atmosphere, and there is a man ordering his own insides to get up.

And then he gives the instruments the same order, and then he says he will wake early, which means he is planning to do this again tomorrow before anything has changed.

So take this at your sink, and know it is not my encouragement, it is what is written: you are able to command your own soul, right now, in a kitchen, with nothing to help you. His word has David saying awake up, my glory, in a cave, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the actual waking, which was never the room and never eight hundred people.

There was a family in England in the seventeen hundreds who wrote six thousand hymns, and they wrote them for exactly this problem.

They were not writing for the meeting. They were writing for the walk home. For the pit. For the kitchen at five in the morning, for a woman with fourteen hours of work ahead of her and nobody to lift her.

The whole point of putting doctrine in a tune is that a tune is portable. It goes where there is no band. It comes back up on its own in an empty room, and it carries a true thing into somebody who has nothing.

And this is worth hearing for a woman who does what you do on Sundays: they were suspicious of an experience that could only happen in a crowd. Not because crowds are bad. Because a thing that only works with eight hundred people is not yet yours.

The name that got attached to those people started as a joke about how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was accurate.

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and the method existed for Monday.