He Had His Answer Ready

Somebody at the front says the words we just need one person, and the whole room becomes fascinated by the floor.

It is a beautiful thing to watch if you are not in it. Twenty people simultaneously discover a mark on their shoe. Somebody checks a phone that has not made a sound. A woman near the back reaches very slowly for her coat, the way you move past a sleeping dog. And the strange part is that most of these people would help. Ask them individually in a corridor and half of them would say yes. It is the open room and the unclaimed sentence hanging in the middle of it that turns everyone to stone.

And your reason is already there. That is the bit worth noticing. It did not arrive when the sentence finished. It was loaded before the sentence started, filed and rehearsed and ready to go, and it comes up so fast it feels less like a thought than a reflex.

I am not really a people person.

I would only mess it up.

I am not the right one for that.

There is someone here who would be much better.

You have a favorite. You could say it in your sleep. And here is what makes it so hard to argue with: it is not a lie. That is the whole difficulty. If the reason were nonsense you would have thrown it out years ago. It is accurate, or it was accurate once, and it has been sitting in the front pocket of your mind ever since, ready for anything that might ask something of you.

So the room goes quiet, and somebody eventually says yes, and it is not you, and there is a small mixed weather that follows you to the car. Relief, mostly. Then something else underneath the relief that you have never quite named, and it is not quite guilt, and it does not go away by Tuesday.

Now here is why I wanted to sit you down beside a particular young man in a small town about six hundred years before the church hall existed.

He had his reason ready too.

He did not stall, he did not think it over, he did not ask for the weekend. God spoke to him and the answer came straight back out of him like a hand going up to catch something thrown at your face. And what God said in reply is, to my mind, one of the kindest sentences anybody has ever been given, and almost nobody hears it as kind, because we have been taught to read it as a telling off.

An ordinary afternoon in Anathoth

The text tells us where he was. Anathoth, in the land of Benjamin, a small place a walk away from the city, and he was of the priests there. So this was a household with a trade in it. He knew what the work looked like from the inside because he had grown up watching his own family do it.

Picture the afternoon rather than the painting. Not a statue with a beard and a scroll. A young man in a small town, in the ordinary heat of an ordinary day, with an ordinary evening ahead of him, in a country whose politics were about to fall apart in ways he would spend the rest of his life speaking into. He was not on a stage. He was somewhere unremarkable, and the word of the Lord came to him there.

And his answer is so human it aches. Ah, Lord God, he says. That little sound at the front, before any of the argument. It is the noise a person makes when something lands on them that they cannot carry. Then the reason: behold, I cannot speak, for I am a child.

Two disqualifications in one breath. I do not have the ability, and I do not have the standing. That is the pocket answer, and it is his real one, and I want to say clearly that he was not being difficult. He was being honest about what he could see.

You are looking at the same God who heard that objection and did not hold it against the man. Nothing in Jeremiah 1 records a rebuke for saying it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that particular mercy into a room where somebody has spent years assuming their hesitation put them out of the running.

But the LORD said unto me, Say not, I am a child: for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak.Jeremiah 1:7

Read what God actually does there, because it is not what we assume.

He does not argue with the facts. He never tells the young man he is older than he thinks, or more capable than he feels, or that he is underselling himself. There is no pep talk anywhere in the chapter. God does not raise his opinion of himself by a single degree.

He changes the subject. From the one being sent to the One doing the sending. Thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee. Whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak. Every load-bearing verb in that sentence belongs to God, and the young man's part is to go and to say.

You have been handed the same arrangement, and it never depended on your assessment of yourself. Scripture puts the going and the speaking under His command rather than under your qualifications, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a sentence like that past the reflex and into the place the reason lives.

God did not argue with the reason

There is a phrase a few verses earlier that most people meet as poetry and walk past as fact. Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee, and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee.

Set that beside the objection. The young man says he is too young. God says the setting apart happened before he had an age at all. Not because his youth was a small thing, but because the order of events had never once run the way he assumed. He thought the qualification came first and the calling second. It had always been the other way round.

You were known and set apart before there was anything about you to assess. That is written into the first page of this book, and it is the Spirit who makes it a present fact rather than a lovely idea, in a person who has been quietly grading themselves for years and coming up short.

Then God says the thing that is actually the answer to the fear underneath. Be not afraid of their faces: for I am with thee to deliver thee. Their faces. Not the task, not the words, not the size of the assignment. The faces of the people in the room, which is what the reflex has always really been about.

And then the strangest and most tender moment in the whole chapter. The Lord put forth his hand, and touched my mouth, and said unto me, Behold, I have put my words in thy mouth.

The one thing the man said he did not have is the exact thing God hands over. I cannot speak, he says. So the equipment arrives, from the outside, by touch, without a lecture about believing in himself first.

You have His words available to you, and they were never expected to come up out of your own supply. Jeremiah 1:9 puts the words in a man's mouth by the hand of God, and the Holy Spirit is described in the gospels as the one who teaches in the same hour what ought to be said, which is not a promotion of your ability but a replacement of the source.