The Words I Have Stopped Hearing

He has said them since he was five years old and he could not tell you the last time he heard one of them.

They are good words. That is what makes it strange. If you sat him down and asked him about any line in it he could tell you what it means and why it is there and why it matters, and he would be right, and it would take him twenty minutes and he would enjoy it.

He believes every word.

And on a Sunday they come out of him the way a hand finds a light switch in the dark.

He noticed it about a year ago because of his nephew. The boy is nine and had been made to learn one of the responses, and afterwards in the car he asked what one particular line actually meant.

And he answered him, and it was a good answer, and halfway through it he heard himself and had to stop.

Because he was explaining, with real warmth, a sentence he had said perhaps four thousand times and had not thought about once in about twenty years.

He is not a man who has lost his faith. Nothing has gone. He would be first at the church in a crisis and everybody knows it.

But the inheritance has become furniture, and furniture is the thing you walk past.

So let me ask you.

Which words do you say every week without hearing a single one of them?

The word Luke chose is the ordinary word for a habit

There is a verse at the start of Jesus' ministry that gets used as scenery and it is not scenery.

He has come back to the town He grew up in. He is about to say the most confrontational thing anybody in that room has ever heard, and it is going to end with them trying to throw Him off a cliff.

And here is how Luke introduces it.

He went to Nazareth, where He had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day He went into the synagogue, as was His custom.Luke 4:16

Notice how ordinary the word is. A custom. The thing you do because it is what you do. You are keeping a habit He kept for thirty years in a building nobody ever wrote about, and the Holy Spirit was in every unrecorded one of them.

As was His custom.

The word behind that is completely ordinary. It is the word for a habit, a usual practice, the thing you do because it is what you do. Luke uses it elsewhere about legal procedure and about burial practice. There is nothing elevated in it at all.

And that is the point.

Jesus had a Saturday habit. He had been doing it since He was a boy in that same building with those same people saying those same words, week after week, for about thirty years, most of which nobody has recorded because nothing remarkable happened in them.

He kept it anyway. Including in the years when, as far as we know, it was entirely ordinary.

Hear where you stand, four thousand recitations in.

You are not a man whose faith has become empty. Scripture describes the Son of God as having a customary Saturday in an unremarkable building, and the Spirit He poured out has not once regarded a habit as the opposite of a living thing.

And I want to say the thing about your inheritance, because you love it and you deserve to have it defended rather than diagnosed.

The words did not stop meaning anything. That is not what happened, and if you go away thinking it is you will start looking for words that feel newer, and in nine years you will not be able to hear those either.

What happened is that you learned them. Properly, all the way down, until they came out on their own, and that is not a failure of the words. It is what learning a thing completely does.

And you have the whole of it in you still. Every line of it is written where nothing can get at it, and the Spirit is not shut out of a sentence by the speed at which a man says it. You are not a man who needs to be given something. You are a man who is carrying something and has stopped feeling the weight of it.

And the odd, hopeful thing is what happened in the car with your nephew. He asked, and you had to say one of them out loud, slowly, in your own words, to somebody who did not know it.

And you heard it.