The Man Who Says Grace

Every night. He does it every night, and he is good at it, and that is the problem.

The children have their hands together before he has said anything, because it is simply what happens at that table. His wife looks at him while he does it. He thanks God for the food and for the day and he mentions someone by name, usually somebody in the family who is having a hard week, and it takes about twenty seconds and it is warm and it is genuine and everybody at the table would tell you their father prays.

Then he lifts his head and picks up a fork and hates himself.

Because he knows what he was like at four o'clock. He knows what he said in the car. He knows the thing he looked at last week, and the thing he has thought about a colleague, and the sharp reply he gave his son on Tuesday over something that did not deserve it.

And so the twenty seconds have become the worst part of his day. Not because he does not mean them. Because he does mean them, and he cannot square that with the rest of the man.

The word he uses privately is fraud.

He has never told anybody. Who would he tell? He is the one who prays. In his family he is the one who is good with all that.

Some nights he thinks about stopping. Then he imagines the children's faces when there is suddenly no grace, and he keeps going, which he has decided is more evidence of the performance.

That is you, and the one you cannot fool is the only one whose opinion is being reported here.

Nothing here is going to argue you out of it

I want to be honest about what I am not doing.

I could tell you that you are being hard on yourself. You would agree politely and nothing would change, because you have already had that conversation with yourself about four hundred times and lost it every time. Scripture put that in writing long before you read it here, in 1 John 3:20, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes written words land.

I could list your good qualities. You know them. They have never once beaten the four o'clock.

The reason arguments do not work on this is that you are not making a mistake about the facts. You did say the thing in the car. Your evidence is real, and that is why the accusation has authority. I have no authority to say that by myself. Scripture carries it in 1 John 3:20, and the Holy Spirit carries it to you.

So I am not going to dispute your evidence. I am going to introduce a witness who has more of it than you do.

You are not going to be argued out of this and you do not have to be. Scripture says thou hast searched me, and known me, Psalm 139:1, and it is offered as the ground a person stands on rather than as an indictment, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes being fully known feel like being held rather than being caught.

The verse for a heart that will not stop

There is a line in 1 John written for exactly the man you are, and it is one of the strangest and best sentences in the whole book. That is Scripture's sentence and not mine, 1 John 3:20, and it is the Holy Spirit and not this page who makes it true where you are.

For if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.1 John 3:20

Notice that John does not deny the condemning. He does not say your heart is wrong to be uncomfortable, or that you should feel better about yourself. He takes it as given: sometimes your own heart passes judgement on you.

And his answer is not reassurance. It is jurisdiction.

God is greater than our heart. Greater is a word about authority. Your heart is a court, and it has been sitting nightly for years, and John says there is a higher one.

Then the last clause, which is the part that will actually help you: and knoweth all things.

Read what that does. Your heart accuses you on the basis of what it knows: the car, the four o'clock, Tuesday. God's verdict comes from somebody who knows all of that and more, and the verdict is still the one He has given.

He is not being kind to you because He has not heard the evidence. He has more of it than your accuser does.

You are not standing under the highest court in this. Scripture says God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things, 1 John 3:20, and the greater knowledge belongs to the one who acquits rather than to the one who accuses, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a higher jurisdiction feel like relief at a dinner table.

What a fraud actually is

Let me take the word off you, because you have been using it wrongly and it has been doing enormous damage. Scripture stands under that in 1 John 3:20, and the Holy Spirit does the part no sentence can do.

A fraud is somebody who does not believe what he is saying and says it for advantage. A man performing faith he does not have, to be admired.

That is not you, and here is how you can tell. A fraud does not lie awake about it. A fraud does not hate the twenty seconds. A fraud is not, at this moment, reading something about it.

What you actually are is a man who believes what he says and does not yet live all of it, which is not fraud. It is the ordinary condition of every Christian who has ever lived, including the ones who wrote the letters.

And there is a second thing. You are praying at that table as a man who needs it, not as a man who has arrived. That is the only honest reason anybody prays. Grace before a meal is not a certificate of conduct; it is a family thanking somebody for food they did not grow.

You are not a fraud, and the distress you feel is evidence of the opposite. Scripture says a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise, Psalm 51:17, and it is precisely the man who is grieved at himself who is being described, and the Holy Spirit is not the author of the word fraud in your head.

What they are actually receiving

You have been assuming that if your children knew what you were like at four o'clock, the twenty seconds would collapse. It is written, in 1 John 3:20, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes what is written off a page and into a life.

They will find out. Not by discovery: children work out their parents slowly and thoroughly and by about nineteen they have a fairly accurate picture.

And what they will have, if you keep going, is this: a man who was not particularly good at being patient, who said things in the car he regretted, and who stood at the head of a table every single night and thanked God anyway.

That is a far better thing to hand a child than a man who appeared to be consistent.

Because the message of the first man is that God is available to somebody ordinary. The message of the second is that you have to be a certain sort of person first, and children who receive that message tend to leave when they find out they are not that sort of person.

You are not damaging them with the gap. Scripture says we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us, 2 Corinthians 4:7, and the cracked container is named as the point rather than as the problem, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets through a man to a table regardless of what happened at four.