He Is Quiet in His Love

His wife is the one God likes. That is not a joke in his house; it is a settled understanding, and he is the one who settled it.

She prays. She has always prayed, since before he knew her, and she prays in a way that makes people go quiet. Their daughter has it too, whatever it is. There is something in both of them that is plainly, obviously connected to God, and he has watched it at close range for twenty-six years and never once been jealous, because he does not resent it, he benefits from it.

And underneath that, quietly, is the thing he actually believes.

He believes he is on their account.

Not saved on their account; he would correct you sharply on that, because he knows his doctrine and he came to Christ himself at thirty-one in a hospital car park. Not saved on their account. Liked on their account. Tolerated for their sake. Included in the household because the household is dear to God and he happens to live in it.

He would put it more cheerfully than that if you asked him. He would say something about being the plodder in the family and laugh.

But at about four in the morning, if he is honest, the picture he has is of a God who is very fond of his wife and his daughter and who puts up with him because they are attached.

Read the verse and count who is in it

The LORD thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing (Zephaniah 3:17).

Look at the pronouns. Thee. Thee. Thee. There is one person in that sentence with God, and everything God is described as doing is aimed at that one.

And look at what He is described as doing, because none of it is toleration.

Rejoice over thee with joy. Rest in His love, which older readers rendered as be quiet in His love, and the picture there is of someone so settled in loving that they have gone silent about it, the way a person does when they are simply looking at somebody they love. And then, extraordinarily, joy over thee with singing.

God, singing, over one person.

You are the one being sung over, and you are not attached to somebody else's file. That is the plain grammar of the verse, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes it land on a man at four in the morning, because Scripture says the Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and children is a word about status and not about proximity.

A household is not a queue

Now let me deal with the picture you have, because it is not disloyal to your wife to have it dismantled.

You have imagined God's affection as something that arrives at a house addressed to the ones who are obviously spiritual, and then spreads out to cover the rest of the household the way heat spreads from a fire.

That is a real thing in human families. Some people are the warm ones and everybody else gathers.

It is not how God relates to people. He does not do households as a single unit with a representative at the front. He calls people by name, one at a time, and the whole of Scripture is full of individual names being spoken by God to individual people, and He has never once needed an introduction from a more spiritual relative.

You are known personally and not by association. The word says He calls His own sheep by name (John 10:3), which is as individual a sentence as the Bible contains, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that felt by a man who has spent twenty-six years cheerfully describing himself as the plodder.

The plodder line

Let me take that one, because you say it a lot and you have said it long enough that you believe it.

There is a real humility in it and I am not going to insult that. But there is also a hiding place, and it is a comfortable one: if you are the plodder, then nothing much is expected of you, and if nothing much is expected of you then nothing much can be disappointed, and you never have to find out whether God is glad about you specifically.

A self-description can be a wall as easily as a fact.

You are not the spare person in your own house. Scripture says He has chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4), and chosen is a word about being picked out rather than picked up, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an ancient sentence like that reach a man who has never applied a warm verse to himself in his life.

And here is the plain limit, because we do not oversell. Reading this does not hand you your wife's prayer life and it does not mean you will feel something at four in the morning tomorrow. What is settled is who the pronouns in that verse belong to, and a man who has put his own name into it stands beside his family differently.