Faith That Feels Borrowed

The room has twelve chairs in it and they are going round the circle, and he has worked out that he is eighth.

It is a weekend away, the kind with a village hall and a rota for the washing up, and somebody has suggested that everyone say briefly how they came to faith. Which is a good idea and a warm room, and the first man has a story that stops the tea trolley: a bad decade, a night in a car, a chapter of John he could not put down. The second has a hospital corridor. The fourth has a friend at university who would not leave him alone about it for two years, and the way he tells it is very funny.

He is counting the chairs.

Because he knows exactly what he is going to say and he has said it before. He is fourth generation. His great-grandfather's name is on a board in a chapel forty miles away, along with the year the roof was paid for. His grandfather led the singing and had a voice you could hear from the lane. His father prayed at the table every single night of his childhood, the same prayer, and he could say it now, and there is a particular way his father said the word bread that he will hear until the day he dies.

He knows every hymn. He can find Habakkuk without the contents page. He has never rebelled, never walked away, never seriously doubted a single fact of it.

And he has always, quietly, felt like a man wearing a very good coat that was cut for somebody else.

It comes to him and he says the thing he says. I've just always known it, really. Grew up with it. Never known anything else.

And everybody nods, kindly, and the ninth chair starts talking about a train station in Leeds, and the moment passes so gently that nobody in the room would ever guess what has just happened in the eighth chair.

Which is this. He has gone back over four generations and found that every one of them had a night. His great-grandfather has a date on the board. His grandfather used to tell about the tent. Even his father, undemonstrative as a fence post, once said a sentence about being nineteen and getting off a bus.

And he has nothing like that. Not a night, not a bus, not a chapter. And the thought that arrives, sitting there with a cup going cold, is the one he has never said to a living soul: I think I might be the first one in this family who is only in the building.

Perhaps you know that chair. Perhaps you can quote more Scripture than anyone who has ever asked you for your story, and the story is the one thing you have never been able to produce.

The clause about the people who were not there

There is a sentence in Deuteronomy that reads like a legal clerk had a hand in it, and it is one of the kindest sentences in the book.

Moses is at Moab. The covenant is being put before the people again before he dies, and the text lists who is standing there: the heads, the elders, the officers, all the men of Israel, the little ones, the wives, and the foreigner in the camp who chops the wood and draws the water. It is a careful list. And then it does something that no ordinary list does.

It is not with you alone that I am making this sworn covenant, but with whoever is standing here with us today before the LORD our God, and with whoever is not here with us today.Deuteronomy 29:14-15

Read that last clause again, slowly. And with whoever is not here with us today.

Nobody had to write that. The oath would have been perfectly complete without it. It is there because the ones who would receive this thing without seeing it were on God's mind while it was being sworn, and He would not let the sentence close without them in it.

That means the man who inherits was not an afterthought or a lower tier of member. He was a named category in the covenant before he existed. Not smuggled in on somebody else's ticket. Written into the clause.

So take it where you sit, in the eighth chair, with a cup going cold: you are inside the sworn thing by the express wording of it, and not by anybody's kindness. Deuteronomy 29:14-15 names the ones who were not standing there, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a clause written at Moab across to a village hall with a rota for the washing up.

Most of the Bible inherited it

Now let me widen this, because that room was not a fair sample of the human race.

Isaac has no Exodus. He is the son of the man who had the fire and the stars and the terrible mountain, and what Isaac gets is his father's account and his father's wells, which he goes round re-digging and giving the old names back to. That is his whole spiritual biography and Scripture does not treat it as thin.

Timothy is the other one, and Paul says it plainly: the sincere faith in you, which dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice, and now, I am persuaded, dwells in you as well. Read what Paul does not do there. He does not commiserate. He does not suggest Timothy get himself a proper crisis to make it his own. He calls the thing that came down through two women sincere, uses the same word for it in the son as in the mother, and then tells him to fan it into flame, which is what you say about a fire you actually have.

Here is where the word borrowed falls apart. A borrowed thing has an owner somewhere else and a date it goes back. Nothing came down your family on those terms. Nobody has to return their mother tongue.

And hear this as the plain state of affairs and not a consolation: you have the same faith, not a copy of somebody's, and the family it came through is how it reached you rather than what it is made of. Scripture calls the faith that arrived through Lois and Eunice sincere in the son who inherited it, and the Holy Spirit does not dwell in a man on a probationary basis while he looks for a better origin story.

The record you have been keeping in the wrong column

Now, the other half, and this is the part I would want said to me.

You believe there is no story here. What there actually is, is a story with no turning point in it, which is a different thing, and it has been marked down as a fail because the room only counted turning points.

Go back over it honestly. There is the fact that four generations in, with every chance and every excuse, you did not walk. There is the night your father's prayer came out of your own mouth over your own child before you had decided to say it. There is a Tuesday in your thirties that was worse than anybody knew, and you got up on the Wednesday, and it has never once been counted as anything. There is a thing done for a neighbor every week for six years that you regard as merely your character.

None of that is a hospital corridor. All of it is God, and it has all been filed under how I happen to be.

I am not going to tell you a night is on its way. I have no such word for you and nobody has. What I will tell you is that the clause at Moab does not have a waiting list attached to it, and there is nothing in the covenant that a dramatic account would upgrade.

You are counted in on the terms God actually used, and no anecdote is being withheld from you as a qualification. Deuteronomy 29:14-15 wrote the absent ones into the oath itself, and the Holy Spirit is the witness in you now, which is the same evidence Paul told a second generation believer to fan into flame.