She teaches adoption. That is the doctrine she has taught for six years and she is better at it than most people who get paid to.
She can take a room of thirty people through it in forty minutes and leave them changed. She does the legal language properly. She does the difference between a servant and a son. She has an illustration about a name being written on a document that makes people put their pens down.
She taught it three weeks ago and a woman cried, and told her afterward that she had understood something for the first time in thirty years.
On the Monday she stood in her own kitchen and could not feel one syllable of it.
Not doubt. She would like that on the record, and I am putting it there. She has not stopped believing that she is adopted, that God is her Father, that the document has her name on it. She would defend every clause of it under any pressure.
She simply cannot feel it about herself, and has not, in any way she can detect, for about two years.
She has thought this might be hypocrisy and decided, honestly, that it is not. Hypocrisy is teaching what you do not believe. She believes it completely and cannot get it in.
And the fear underneath, which she has never said out loud to a single person, is this: that she has become a pipe. That things pass through her to other people and nothing stays, and that this might be the actual arrangement for somebody like her, permanently.
Put it in their mouths
There is an instruction at the very end of Moses' life that tells you what God thinks a song is for, and it is startlingly mechanical.
Now therefore write ye this song for you, and teach it the children of Israel: put it in their mouths, that this song may be a witness for me against the children of Israel.Deuteronomy 31:19
Take that in your kitchen. You are the route as well as the room, and the mouth was always the way in. The word says put it in their mouths, that this song may be a witness, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the depositing.
Put it in their mouths.
Not: explain it to them until they understand. Not: make sure they feel it. Put it in their mouths, which is a physical instruction about a route, and the reason given is that the song will be a witness later, when they have forgotten everything else.
God is describing a delivery mechanism. Words go in through the mouth, sit in a person for years, and testify at a time nobody planned for.
And notice what is completely absent. There is no mention anywhere of how anybody is supposed to feel while singing it. The song does its work later, in a generation that has not been born yet, in people who at the time of the singing were mostly not paying attention.
So take this in your kitchen, and know it is not my consolation, it is what is written: your mouth is the route in and it always has been. His word says put it in their mouths that it may be a witness, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the depositing and the testifying, and He has never once needed the singer to feel it on the day.
There was a family in England in the seventeen hundreds who wrote six thousand hymns for people who could not read a word of the Bible.
And they were doing exactly what that verse describes: putting doctrine into mouths, on purpose, as a delivery method, for people who had no other route to it and no time to study.
But here is the piece for a teacher. Those men also sang. They did not stand at the front and administer hymns to other people. The man who wrote them sang them, constantly, in his own house and on his own horse, and he wrote in his journal about the days when they did nothing for him, and he went on singing them.
He never treated himself as the supplier and the congregation as the recipients. He was in the room.
The name that got attached to those people started as mockery of 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 reason the warmth survived is that he kept putting it in his own mouth.
You have been teaching adoption and never once been taught it by yourself.
And nobody did that to you; it happened one Sunday at a time. His word says put it in their mouths, that this song may be a witness, and it is the Holy Spirit who deposits a thing that testifies years later.
That is the shape of it. Everything you have has gone out. Six years of preparing, framing, illustrating, delivering, and every single time the doctrine has been aimed at a room and never at the woman standing at the front of it.
So put it in your own mouth. Not explain it to yourself, which you can do brilliantly and which has produced nothing. Say it, out loud, in the first person, about yourself, which is a completely different act and which you have possibly never done.
"I am adopted. God is my Father. My name is on that document."
It will feel absurd. Prepare for that. A woman who can explain a thing to thirty people finds it faintly humiliating to say it slowly to herself in a kitchen, and that humiliation is the exact reason nobody in your position ever does it.
You are adopted right now, and I am not saying it to reassure you; it is written that ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who bears witness with your spirit, which means the witnessing was never your job and was never going to come out of your own preparation.
And the fear about being a pipe. That is not the arrangement and it is not permanent. It is a habit, six years deep, of a woman who prepares in the third person and delivers in the second and has never once used the first.
Put it in your mouth. That is what the verse says to do with a song, and it turns out to be what you do with a doctrine as well.
You are adopted right now, on a Monday, in a kitchen, with none of it reaching you. His word says ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who beareth witness with your spirit, which was never going to come out of your own preparation.
Declare this over yourself
- Habit of six years, you are good work and you are not a route I get to skip, and you do not aim this at everybody except me. His word says put it in their mouths that it may be a witness, so I put it in mine in the name of Jesus.
- Fear about the pipe, you have no place in this kitchen, and I have never once said you out loud until now. Scripture says the Spirit Himself bears witness with my spirit that I am a child of God, and His Spirit does that witnessing and not my preparation.
- God, the song goes in my mouth as a witness, and my mouth is the route in. Your word says write it, teach it, put it in their mouths, so I am saying it in the first person today, out loud, in my ordinary voice.
Deuteronomy 31:19
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