Somebody says it from the front most weeks and she has heard it perhaps a thousand times.
God loves everyone.
And something happens in her when she hears it, and it happens fast, and she has never once caught it in the act. By the time she notices anything the sentence has already been through a machine in her chest and come out the other side in different words.
What comes out is: God tolerates me along with the rest.
She is thirty six.
She would not put it that strongly to anybody who asked. If a friend at this table said do you think God loves you she would say yes, and mean it, and it would even be true.
But watch what she does with the word everyone, because that is where the whole thing lives.
Everyone is a category. She is inside it. She has never once questioned that she is inside it and she is not fishing for reassurance about it.
She has simply never been able to get from inside the category to being wanted in particular, and a woman who is inside a category is a woman who was not excluded, which is not the same thing as a woman who was wanted, and she knows the difference because she has lived on the wrong side of it her whole life.
Her mother used to say, of family occasions, everyone is welcome. Which was true. And which meant that nobody was going to notice if she was not there, and one year she tested it, and she was right.
So when the sentence comes from the front on a Sunday, it lands exactly where every kind general sentence has landed since she was twelve.
Everyone includes me, I suppose.
You know the translation. Yours may run on a different word. But you know what it is to be handed something warm and general and to have it turn, somewhere between your ears and your chest, into an assurance that you have not been thrown out.
He said out loud what He wanted
Let me name the pit before we go to the verse, because if this becomes an article that says God loves everyone with more emphasis, it will go through the same machine and come out the same way, and you will have wasted a Sunday afternoon.
The pit is not that you doubt the general sentence. You believe it. The pit is that the general sentence is the only kind you have ever been given, and a general sentence cannot answer the question you are actually asking, no matter how loudly anybody says it.
So here is one that is not general.
O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!Matthew 23:37
Read what kind of sentence that is before anything else.
It is addressed. He names a city, twice, and He is looking at it while He says it.
It is about wanting. How often would I have gathered. Not I was available. Not the offer stood. Would I have gathered, which is a statement about His own desire, said out loud, by Him, in public, about a particular place.
And it ends: and ye would not.
I am not going to move quickly past that clause, because it is the reason this verse can be trusted. This is not a warm generality. This is a man standing over a city that did not come, saying out loud that He wanted to gather it, and grieving. There is real loss in that sentence and the loss is His.
A general sentence costs the speaker nothing. This one cost Him something, and He said it anyway, and He said it about somebody in particular.
Take that at the coffee table, and know it is not my encouragement, it is what is written. He says out loud what He wanted, in the first person, about a particular place, and that is not a category you happen to fall inside. Matthew 23:37 puts the wanting on His side and names it, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a written sentence land in a chest, and He is not restricted to the general.
And here I draw the line this site always draws, in the same breath. God is neither male nor female. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and He is not a woman either; He is spirit. The hen and her chicks is one of the ways Scripture describes Him with a mother's picture beside a father's, and both are His own, and it does not make the Spirit a woman and it does not make God a goddess.
Eleven years of newsletters cannot do what one addressed envelope does.
You are addressed and not merely included, and you were spoken about by name before you were ever counted into a category. Matthew 23:37 has Him naming a city twice and saying out loud what He wanted over it, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries an addressed sentence into a chest, which no general one has ever been able to do.
That is what has been missing, and it is not that you have been failing to believe the general sentence hard enough. It is that a general sentence cannot be addressed, and you need an addressed one, and there is one.
So read the verse with your own name in it.
Out loud, and slowly, because a woman who has spent twenty four years translating warm sentences into tolerable ones is going to have to hear this one arrive with nowhere to translate it to.
He said out loud that He wanted to gather, and He said it grieving, and He said it over a name. That is Matthew 23:37 read as the addressed sentence it is, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries a word from a page into a person, and He does not do it by making the general louder.
And the grief in the last clause stays. I am not going to take it out, and I am not going to use it on you, and nothing in this article is a lever to get you to do something before the end of it.
But look at what the grief tells you about the wanting. Nobody grieves over a category. That clause is only there because the wanting was real and particular, and a man does not stand over a city with his voice breaking about a policy of general availability.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud at the table or in the car. You are in Christ, and the authority to speak over a translation that has run since you were twelve is delegated to you in Him; it does not depend on your feeling wanted when you say it, and you may not. These stand on what is written in Matthew and are carried by the Holy Spirit, not by anything happening in your chest. What He does with the machine in you, and when, is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own timing.
- Translation I run on every kind sentence, you turn wanting into tolerating, and I put you down in the name of Jesus. Matthew 23:37 says how often would I have gathered, which is a wanting said out loud in the first person over a name.
- Word everyone, you are not the only kind of sentence I have been given, and you never were. It is written that He stood over a particular city and grieved that it would not come, and His Spirit is the one who carries an addressed word into a chest, which a category cannot do.
- Lord, You are neither male nor female, and You gather like a hen gathers her chicks. I read this verse out loud with my own name in it and I stay still afterward, and when the translating starts I am not following it.
Matthew 23:37
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