Awake at Four Ten

Four ten. Not four, not quarter past. Four ten, and he has checked enough times over six years to know it is not an approximation.

He does not wake up frightened. That is what makes it so hard to explain to anybody, and it is why he never has. He wakes up already carrying it. The weight is on his chest before his eyes are open, arriving fully assembled, the way a room is already there when you switch the light on. He lies still for a while so as not to wake his wife. Then he gets up, and puts the kettle on, and sits in the kitchen in the dark, and waits for the light to come up over the wall.

This is a man who prayed a specific prayer about a specific thing eleven years ago and meant every word of it. He is not confused about the doctrine. If you sat him down he could explain it to you clearly and he would be right about all of it. He believes he is forgiven.

And here is what six years of four ten has quietly persuaded him of: that the waking is the truth and the doctrine is the theory.

Because it is so regular. That is the part. A feeling that came and went would be a feeling. Something that arrives at the same minute for six years starts to look less like weather and more like a notice being served, and a serious man draws the conclusion a serious man would draw, which is that something out there has not been settled and this is how he is being told.

He has never said it out loud. Not to his wife, who sleeps two feet away and has never once been told what the kettle at four fifteen is about. Not to his brother. Not to anybody at the church he has been part of for nineteen years, because it sounds, when a man says it out loud, like a small thing, and it is not a small thing, and he cannot bear to have it treated like one.

Maybe you have a four ten. It might be a time of day, or the second you wake, or a particular five minutes on the drive to work. Something arrives, in the same place, every time, and it has been arriving so long that you have stopped calling it a feeling and started reading it as information.

Sit down. There is nothing here that is going to tell you the feeling is nothing.

A feeling is not a finding

Let me put the distinction plainly, because everything else in this article rests on it.

There is what is legally true about you, and there is what you feel. Those are two different registers, and they can disagree for years without either one changing the other. A verdict is delivered in a courtroom. A feeling is delivered in a body. When the two disagree, the body does not get a vote, however loud it is and however early it gets up.

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.Romans 8:1

Read the word now. Not one day. Not once you feel differently about it. Now, which was as true at four ten this morning as it will be at noon. You are living under a verdict that was entered before your body ever learned this habit, and Romans 8 is where it is written down in one sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who applies a verdict rather than a mood.

And notice what that verse does not do. It does not say there is now no feeling of condemnation. It says there is no condemnation. The condemnation is what is gone. The feeling of it is a separate object entirely, and Scripture nowhere promises that the second one leaves at the same time as the first. You have been holding God to a promise He never made about your chest at four ten, and what He actually wrote down is a ruling and not a forecast, and His Spirit is the one who has kept you reading the ruling all six years.

Why four ten is so convincing

Now the mechanism, because a serious man will do better with an explanation than with reassurance.

Regularity feels like evidence. It should not, but it does. A thing that happens at the same minute for six years reads to a mind as a system, and a system implies an author, and the mind concludes that something is being communicated on purpose. That is not stupidity. That is exactly how a mind is supposed to work about most things, and it happens to be badly wrong about this one.

Here is what four ten actually is. It is a groove. A body learned a shape in a hard season, and bodies are extraordinarily good at keeping a shape long after the reason for it has been dealt with. Somebody who has worked nights for years still wakes at the same hour on vacation. Nothing is being served. A pattern is being run.

And there is a practical point sitting inside this that nobody may have said to you. Six years of waking at the same minute is also a sleep matter and can be a medical one, and a man who goes to a doctor about it is not being unspiritual. He is being sensible. A body affects a soul and it always has.

You are not being sent a message at four ten, and Psalm 103 says as far as the east is from the west so far has He removed our transgressions from us, and it is His Spirit and not your sleep pattern who reports on where they went.

I am not going to promise you it lifts

Now the honest part, and this is where I will not do what somebody probably did once.

I am not going to tell you the weight will be gone by next month. I do not know that, and nobody who tells you does. Some people find that when the reading changes the feeling follows within a season. Some carry it for years. There is no promised timetable in Scripture and I will not invent one to make this article land better.

What I will say is that the feeling was never the thing that made the verdict real, so it is not the thing that can unmake it. You were pardoned by a completed act and not by a completed emotion, and Hebrews 10 says by one offering He has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified, and the Spirit is what makes that stand on a morning when nothing in your body agrees.

And I will say something else, which is that a man is allowed to obey his verdict rather than his chest. That is not pretending. Pretending would be saying you feel fine. Saying the verdict out loud while it is still sitting on you is the opposite of pretending: it is telling the truth about the law while telling the truth about the feeling.