She can take a room from flat to standing in about six minutes and she has never once faked it.
That is worth saying first because the obvious accusation is not the true one. She is not a performer. When she preaches the power of God something in her rises that she did not manufacture and could not manufacture, and eight hundred people feel it, and half of them go home changed, and she goes home too.
She has been doing it nineteen years.
And here is what happens on the Monday, in her own kitchen, standing at the counter with the kettle on.
Nothing.
Not despair. She wants that clear; this is not a story about a woman falling apart. She sleeps, she eats, she laughs at her sister on the phone. Her life is fine.
It is that when it comes to the other half of God, she has no receiving apparatus at all.
If somebody says God is tender toward you, she agrees. She would preach it if the passage came up. She can define it, defend it, cross reference it. And it goes into her the way a lecture goes into a room where nobody is taking notes.
She noticed the size of the gap in June. A woman she had prayed with came back to tell her what had happened, and it was a good story, and at the end of it the woman said, "And He was so gentle with me."
And she felt, for about a second and a half, something she has not been able to name since. Not envy. Something more like standing outside a house in the rain and hearing people eating.
She has never said this to anybody. She is not sure who she would say it to. In the rooms she is in she is the one people say things to.
You know the gap. Yours may be at a different half of Him. But you know what it is to be a channel for something you have never once been the address of.
One God, and you get all of Him
Let me name the pit before we go near a verse, because if I aim at the wrong thing this will land as a rebuke and it is not one.
The pit is not hypocrisy. You are not preaching what you do not believe; you are preaching what you do believe and cannot personally receive, and those are entirely different conditions, and only one of them is a sin. The pit is that somewhere along the line the tenderness of God got filed as material and not as supply, and material is something you carry to other people, and nineteen years of carrying has trained your hands beautifully and left your mouth shut.
Here is the sentence, and I want it read flat.
God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent.Numbers 23:19
God is not a man.
He is not male the way the men in your life are male, and He is not female either, and He is not a strong God with a gentle department. He is God. He is spirit. He is neither male nor female, and Scripture says so plainly, and the very same Scripture then reaches for a father's language and a mother's both, because one God who is neither is too large for either picture on its own.
Take that at your counter, and know it is not my consolation, it is what is written. The half of God you have never received is not a different God. Numbers 23:19 puts Him beyond male and female entirely, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence that plain and moves it out of the sermon file and into a Monday.
And Genesis says it at the very front, before anybody had time to sort God into departments.
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.Genesis 1:27
One image, two kinds of person to carry it. Which means the fire you deliver on a Sunday and the gentleness that woman received in June came out of the same place, and there is no back door on one of them.
And here is the boundary, said in the same breath, because on this ground the picture never travels without it. Genesis 1:27 does not make God part male and part female. It does not give Him a feminine side. He is never prayed to as Mother and no title Scripture withholds is invented for Him. What the verse settles is where every good thing in a human being came from, and the answer is: one God, who is neither.
You have been standing in the rain outside a house you have keys to. I am not softening anything; that is what one God means, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the letting in, and He has never once required a woman to preach her way to the door.
You are not being asked to preach differently. Nothing about Sunday is wrong.
You are able to receive the gentleness you have been handing out, and it was never the lesser half of Him. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, which means His tenderness is not a man's tenderness and does not thin out at the end of a hard week, and it is the Holy Spirit who gets that past a woman who can preach it and not take it.
You are being asked to eat.
And I know exactly how that will feel, because a woman who has been the supply for nineteen years finds it faintly humiliating to be handed something, and the humiliation is the whole reason nobody in your position ever does it. So we make it small.
Stand at the counter on Monday and say one tender sentence about God out loud, in the first person, about yourself. Not "God is gentle." That is material. Say: God is gentle with me.
Then put a hand flat on the counter, and do not do anything else for about ten seconds.
You are inside that sentence right now, in your own kitchen, and it is not a lecture. That is Genesis 1:27 and Numbers 23:19 standing together, and it is the Holy Spirit who moves a truth from the file where you keep sermons into the place where a woman actually lives, and He does that at His own pace and He does not do it faster because somebody is gifted.
And I want to take one thing off you before you go. The second and a half you felt in June was not envy and it was not sin. It was hunger, which is a signal and not a fault, and hunger in a person who has been feeding others for nineteen years is the most reasonable thing in the world.
The God of the eight hundred is the God of your kitchen, and He is neither male nor female, and He carries the whole of both. He has not been withholding the gentle half. It has been arriving on Mondays for nineteen years and finding nowhere to be put down.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud at the counter, on your own. You are in Christ, and the authority to speak over your own life is delegated to you in Him; it is not earned by what you can do for eight hundred people. These stand on what is written in Numbers and in Genesis, carried by the Holy Spirit and not by your gifting. How He opens the receiving, and when, is His to decide, and He answers in His own way.
- Half of God I can deliver and cannot receive, you are not two Gods, and I say so in the name of Jesus. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, so the gentle half and the burning half are one God, and there is no back door on either of them.
- Filing that put His tenderness under material and not under supply, you have no place in this kitchen. It is written that male and female were both made in His image, and His Spirit is the one who moves a truth out of a sermon file, which was never something I could arrange by preparing harder.
- Lord, You are neither male nor female and the whole of both is Yours. I read Genesis 1:27 out loud in my own kitchen and I say that You are gentle with me, and I put my hand on the counter and let it be a sentence and not a point.
Numbers 23:19
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