The Verse I Teach and Never Take

Wednesday, seven o'clock, the side room with the radiator that clanks. Forty people on a good week, thirty on a wet one.

She has taught that room for nine years and she is genuinely good at it. Not showy. She does the work. She will tell you what a word does in the Hebrew and then tell you why it matters to a woman who has to be up at five, and she never once makes anybody feel stupid for not knowing.

And she teaches confession beautifully. It is one of her best evenings and she has done it four times now. She does Proverbs 28 and she does the psalm about the bones and she does 1 John, and she gets to the part where she says that God is not standing there with His arms folded waiting for a better apology, He is faithful and just, and it lands every single time, and women come up afterward.

She means all of it. That is the thing. She is not a hypocrite. She has staked her life on that verse and it is true.

There is one thing she has never applied it to.

Nine years, four teachings, and there is one place in her own history that has been sitting outside the reach of everything she teaches, quietly, the way a room in a house can be shut off and the rest of the house still be perfectly warm. She has never told a living soul. Not her husband. Not the two women she has led that group with. Not the pastor.

And here is the part she has never let herself state plainly: she has never said it to God either.

She prays. Considerably. She prays over that group by name every Tuesday. She has just learned across nine years to be an excellent teacher of a doctrine she has not personally stood under, and she is so practiced at it now that she can teach the whole evening without ever once noticing the room she is not in.

You know that room. It may not be a Bible study. It may be that you can give anybody good advice about the exact thing you cannot do. One thing. Never said to a person. Never said to God. And knowing the doctrine cold has somehow become the reason it never gets applied, because you already know what it says, so what is left to do.

Close the notes for a minute. Nobody here is going to ask you what happened.

Knowing it is not standing under it

Let me put the teacher's own tools on the teacher for a minute, gently, and only because she would do it for anybody else.

Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy.Proverbs 28:13

She has taught that. She has said the word conceal is an active word, a covering, a hand held over a thing, and she was right. What she has never once said out loud is that a covering hand gets tired, and that a woman can hold one over the same square inch for nine years and call it composure.

You have a hand that is allowed to come down now, and Proverbs 28 is where the promise attached to it is written, and it is the Holy Spirit and not your own teaching notes who is loosening the fingers. Obtain mercy. Not earn it, not qualify for it. Obtain, the way a person receives a thing that was already being held out.

Here is the difference between knowing and standing. Knowing is what she does on a Wednesday. Standing is putting her own weight on it, in an empty room, where nothing is riding on her being able to explain it. You are allowed to be a person under the doctrine and not only a woman in front of it, and Scripture says the word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart, and the Spirit is the one who moves a thing that distance.

Why the one who teaches it is the last to take it

Now the part underneath, and I say this as somebody who teaches for a living.

There is a particular trap set for the person who explains the thing. Explaining it gives a person the feeling of having handled it. A whole week spent near the doctrine, turning it over, finding a better illustration, watching it work on somebody else in row three. The nervous system files all of that as done.

And there is a second trap, and it is heavier. A woman who teaches a room believes, somewhere she has never examined, that her usefulness to that room depends on her being ahead of it. To stand under the verse would be to be in the room rather than in front of it, and she does not know who she is in that position.

You were never in front of that room on merit, and 2 Corinthians 4 says we have this treasure in clay jars so the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us, and the Spirit who has taught through you for nine years is the one saying so. The pot was always a pot. Nobody in that circle was ever getting light off the pottery.

Nobody is taking a statement, including Him

Now the practical part, and it is smaller than nine years of good teaching have made it.

There is no requirement to tell a person. Not your husband, not the women you lead with, not the pastor, not me. No verse anywhere puts that on you, and a teacher of all people should refuse to invent one. Some things belong between a woman and God, and that is discretion, not concealment.

And there is no requirement to describe it to Him. He was there. You have nothing left to establish, because 1 John 1:9 calls Him faithful and just about exactly this, and it is His Spirit who applies that and not the quality of your account.

So it can be four words. It can be one name. Notice what your own psalm does: it says the man stopped keeping silent, and then it goes straight to God forgiving him, and it never records a syllable of the content. You have taught that. Now take it.