The Thing I Said Out Loud

There was a year. She calls it the bad year and she has never once been more specific about it out loud to anybody.

What everybody knows is the outside of it. What nobody knows is that somewhere in the middle of it, alone, in a kitchen, she said something out loud about God.

Not a doubt. Not a complaint. She has heard people call it a complaint when they are trying to be kind and she knows the difference. It was a sentence, said deliberately, into an empty room, and she meant it at the time, and she has never been able to unsay it because a thing said out loud does not come back.

She has read Mark 3 a hundred times since. She could recite it. Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin. She has read four different explanations of what that means and she has believed the worst one at three in the morning and a better one at four in the afternoon and neither of them has held for a week.

Nobody knows. Not her husband. Not her sister. Not the pastor, who she genuinely trusts and who has known her nineteen years. Because the thing about this particular terror is that it is the one fear a person cannot ask about casually. There is no way to raise it at a coffee table. You cannot say it lightly and you cannot say it heavily, so it never gets said at all, and it sits there, and it grows in the exact conditions it grows best in, which are silence and the small hours.

Maybe you have that chapter. Or another one. And you have been reading it alone for years, looking for yourself in it, and finding yourself every time because a frightened person always does.

Sit down here by the window. I am not going to tell you the fear is silly, and I am not going to hand you a verdict.

The one thing I will say about who that passage is describing

I am going to handle the text and I am not going to pronounce on you, and I want you to know the difference up front, because both have been handed to you before and only one of them was honest.

Read the scene. The Pharisees are watching Jesus deliver a man in front of them. They are seeing the Spirit of God at work with their own eyes, in daylight, and they turn to the crowd and say it is the work of the devil. They are not confused, they are not frightened and they are not in a bad year. They are looking straight at God's Spirit working and calling it evil on purpose, to keep a crowd from following Him. And Mark tells you why Jesus said what He said, in a sentence right at the end that almost nobody quotes:

for they were saying, He has an unclean spirit.Mark 3:30

That is a settled, deliberate, ongoing verdict, delivered by men whose whole position depended on it. It is a stance, not a sentence in a kitchen.

You are describing a bad year and Mark is describing a strategy, and that is what is written at the end of the passage and not a softening I have added, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept you at this chapter because He will not let you settle for a wrong answer about yourself.

I am not going to tell you the passage cannot be about you, because nobody can see inside another person from a page and anybody who claims to is selling something. What I will say is this: you were never given the job of being the judge in your own case, and 1 Corinthians 4 says Paul himself refused to judge himself and left the verdict to the Lord, and it is His Spirit who lifts a woman out of a chair she was never qualified to sit in.

The fear is not the evidence

Now the thing that has been true for however many years this has been going on.

The terror over this passage is the exact opposite of the posture the passage describes. The men in Mark 3 are not afraid. They have no interest in being wrong. There is no record anywhere in Scripture of a person who committed that sin and then spent years frightened about it, because the whole nature of what is being described is a heart that has stopped caring what the answer is.

You have been awake at three in the morning over a Spirit you are afraid you have offended, and that grief is called the work of the Spirit in a person all over the New Testament, and the Spirit does not grieve a person over Himself in order to be rid of them. Fear like this is not a symptom of departure. It is a symptom of belonging to something you are terrified of losing.

You were held through the whole bad year, and it is written that He does not break a bruised reed or quench a smoldering wick, and the Spirit who kept a wick lit through that kitchen is not looking for a reason to put it out now.

Why it has to leave your head

Here is the most practical thing in this article, and I want it said before the breakthrough rather than after it.

A fear like this cannot be resolved by a woman alone. It is structurally unresolvable alone, because the only instrument in that room at three in the morning is the same mind that is generating the fear, and it will always find the evidence it went looking for. That is not a spiritual failure. That is how a mind works at three in the morning about anything.

So it has to be spoken. Out loud, first to God, and then, this week, to a real person with a face, in daylight. Your pastor has known you nineteen years and can absolutely hold this, and he has almost certainly heard it before, because far more people carry this exact fear than ever say so. A counselor is a good idea too, especially if the bad year is still in your body.

You are allowed to need somebody else in the room for this, and Galatians 6 says bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ, and it is the Holy Spirit who put a plural into a verse about carrying things. This was never designed to be carried alone and the aloneness has been doing most of the damage.