Never In Front Of Anybody

Faisal has had it since he was thirty-three and no living person has heard him use it.

Not his wife. Not the two men he would call closest to him. Nobody at any church he has been part of in twenty years, and there have been three.

It happens in the car, mostly. Sometimes very early, in the kitchen, before anybody else is up. Once, memorably, in a stairwell at work at about seven in the evening when he thought the building was empty, and he stopped after about nine seconds because he heard a door.

He is not ashamed of it. That is not quite the thing. He has never regarded it as strange and he has no theological trouble with any of it.

But the fact of twenty years of complete privacy has started to look, to him, like a fact about his courage rather than about his preference.

Because he can construct the sentence. I have had this for twenty years and I have never let anybody hear it. And however he arranges that sentence, it sounds like a man hiding something, and he cannot make it sound like anything else, and he has tried.

He is fifty-three.

And in the last couple of years there have been two occasions in rooms where it would not have been strange, and he did not, and both times he told himself something afterwards that he did not entirely believe.

You may know the car.

Maybe yours is also entirely private. Maybe you also cannot arrange the sentence so that it sounds like a preference. And maybe you have started to suspect it is about nerve.

The verse names the direction

There is a sentence in 1 Corinthians 14 that describes what is actually happening, and the direction it names settles a great deal.

For he that speaketh in an unknown tongue speaketh not unto men, but unto God: for no man understandeth him.1 Corinthians 14:2

Not unto men, but unto God.

That is Paul's description of the ordinary case. The speaking is directed upward rather than outward, and he says so plainly, and then gives the reason: nobody else can follow it anyway.

Which means twenty years in a car is not a truncated version of the thing. It is the thing, described in the text, operating in the direction the text says it operates in.

And notice that the whole chapter which follows is Paul working out what to do when this is done in a gathering, precisely because it is not aimed at the room. He has to construct arrangements for a public use of something whose natural direction is private, and the arrangements are considerable, and the reason he needs them is that the direction is upward by default.

And the speaking was always directed upward rather than outward. The written word names the direction in the plainest terms and gives the reason, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a man who has been reading twenty private years as a defect.

And He gave you a way to pray past your own words. The word makes it speech to God rather than a demonstration to anybody, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than requiring an audience.

The sentence you cannot arrange

Now the sentence, because you have been trying to arrange it for two years and it will not go.

I have had this for twenty years and I have never let anybody hear it.

The reason it always sounds like hiding is that the verb let is doing something. It implies that somebody was trying to hear and was prevented, and that there is therefore a withholding going on.

But nobody has been trying to hear. There is no audience being denied. A thing directed to God that happens in a car is not being kept from anybody; it is simply going where it goes.

Rearrange it accurately and it reads differently: for twenty years I have prayed this way to God, alone. Which is a description of an ordinary devotional life rather than a confession, and which is also exactly what has been happening.

And nothing has been withheld from anybody. The word says the speaking is not unto men, which means there was never an audience with a claim on it, and the Spirit is the one who lets a man state his own twenty years accurately.

And nothing about you is under review for the two occasions. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a man who told himself something afterwards that he did not entirely believe.

And nothing here settles the public question

Let me be plain about what this article will not do.

I am not going to tell you whether you should use it in a gathering, or when, or under what arrangements. That has been argued about for a very long time by serious people and I am not going to resolve it in a paragraph, and this site is not where that argument gets settled.

What I will say is that the question of public use is a genuinely separate question from the one you have been carrying, and you have had them fused for two years.

The one you have been carrying is whether twenty private years means something about you. It does not. The other one is a question about a room, and it is not urgent, and it does not have to be answered tonight or ever for the first one to be closed.

And you are not required to settle a question about rooms in order to be settled about yourself. The word describes the private direction in one verse and takes a whole chapter over the public arrangements, and the Spirit is the one who lets a man hold those apart.