Held Up While It Is Said

He hears the blessing and does the arithmetic.

Not consciously. It is faster than thinking. The minister says the LORD bless you and keep you and something in him starts a clock, and the clock is counting down to the moment he undoes it, because in his experience there is always such a moment and it is usually Tuesday.

He is thirty-nine. He is not a wild man. He has a job and a mortgage and a dog and a temper he has mostly got the measure of, and the wreckage in his life is not spectacular. It is small and it is regular. A sentence he should not have said to his sister. Four days where he did not open the book. A week where he was, if he is honest, just about tolerable to live with.

So when good words come, he cannot get his hands round them, because he is already bracing. He does not disbelieve the blessing. He believes it entirely, for about as long as he can keep himself upright underneath it, which he estimates, based on decades of evidence, at somewhere between three and nine days.

There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes from receiving nothing while agreeing with everything. He has it. He has had it for years, and he could not tell you what it is called.

You have been doing a job that was never yours

I want to show you a sentence, and I want you to notice who is doing what in it.

Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy (Jude 24).

Him that is able. Not you that are able. The whole grammatical weight of that sentence sits on God, and the person being kept is doing nothing in it at all except being kept, and being presented, and, apparently, being the occasion of somebody's exceeding joy.

You have spent your adult life reading the blessing as a thing handed to you which you then have to hold. That is why you cannot receive it. A man who thinks he has to hold a thing will always calculate whether he can, and you have run that calculation honestly and come back with the answer nine days, and so you brace instead of opening your hands.

You are being held, and you have never once been the one doing the holding. That is what the word actually says about who keeps whom, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a written promise into a felt steadiness in a man on a Tuesday, which is exactly the day you have been dreading since Sunday.

Keep is His verb in every single sentence it appears in

Go and look at the word in the blessing. The LORD bless you and keep you. Who is the subject of that verb? Not the person under the hand.

Go and look at the psalm about the hills. He that keeps you will not slumber. The LORD is your keeper. The LORD shall preserve you from all evil (Psalm 121:3 to 7). Six occurrences of the word, and every single time God is the one doing it and the person is the one it is done to.

This is not a technicality. It is the difference between a good week and a life.

You have a Keeper, and you have been trying to be your own. The written word never once puts the keeping in your hands, and the Spirit of God is described as the seal on a believer rather than a reward for a good run, which means what happened on Tuesday did not break the seal and could not.

What actually happens when you fall

Now let me handle the thing you are afraid of, because I am not going to pretend it does not happen.

You will have days. You had one last week. The question was never whether a man falls; Scripture is completely unembarrassed about that and says a just man falls seven times and rises up again (Proverbs 24:16). The question is what the falling proves.

You have believed it proves the blessing was misapplied. That God said a good word over a man who then demonstrated he should not have had it.

But look at Jude again. Able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless. Faultless is not a description of your Tuesday. It is a description of what He is able to present, which means the presenting is His work and the faultlessness is His to supply.

You are not on probation and the blessing is not conditional on your run of form. God said I will bless them, full stop, with no clause about the following Tuesday, and it is the Holy Spirit and not your consistency who keeps a man standing in what has been said over him.

And here is the honest part, because we do not oversell. Nothing here promises you a week without a fall. It does not promise your temper never goes again. What is guaranteed is the One who is able, and a man who knows who is doing the keeping falls differently from a man who thinks he is the last line of defense.