It Went Straight Into The File

He got about nine words in and his hand was already going for the pen.

It was a Tuesday morning. He was in the chair he reads in, and he was not preparing anything; he had a fortnight before he was next up, and this was the ordinary reading he does most mornings before the house wakes.

Isaiah sixty six. And then that sentence, which he has known for years and has, if he is honest, never done much with.

As one whom his mother comforteth.

And by the end of the clause he had thought: that is the third point. That is the one that goes after the bit about the Father in Luke 15. Nobody expects the mother picture and it will land beautifully in that room.

He wrote it on a card. He has the card.

And then he sat there and something in him went very quiet, because he had noticed, for once, what had just happened. God said something about His own tenderness, in the first person, and it had been in his hands for about four seconds before it became a resource.

He is fifty. He has been preaching for twenty two years.

He has thousands of cards. There is a box, and there are files on the laptop, and there is a system that a younger man envied out loud at a conference. Every good thing he has ever read is in there.

And on that Tuesday he tried to think of the last time a verse had got into him before it got into the system, and he could not do it. Not once in years. Everything true that arrives arrives already labeled, already useful, already going somewhere, and it goes there, and it feeds people, and it is not fed to him.

His wife would tell you he is not cold. He is not. He weeps at other people's stories. It is his own supply that has been rerouted, and it happened so gradually that there is no day to point at.

You know the file. Yours may not be sermons. But you know what it is to have a use for something arrive before the thing itself does, and to have been the last person in the room to be fed by what you carry.

It was said to you before it was ever said to a room

Let me name the pit before we go on, because if this becomes a point about the dangers of preparation it will be filed too, and you know it will.

The pit is that your hands are faster than your heart. That is all. It is not cynicism and it is not professionalism gone wrong; it is a reflex built by twenty two years of being responsible for feeding people, and reflexes do not ask permission. And the cost is that the one man in that building who handles the most Scripture receives the least of it.

So here is the sentence, and I want you to read it as a thing addressed to you.

As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.Isaiah 66:13

Notice who is speaking and to whom.

That is God, in the first person, choosing His own comparison, saying what He is like. And the you in it is not a congregation you are going to stand in front of in a fortnight. It is a person. It was written to people who had been through something, and it is read by people who have been through something, and on Tuesday morning at about ten past six it was being said to a man in a chair.

Here I draw the line in the same paragraph, because on this ground the picture never travels without it. 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. Isaiah 66:13 is a simile God chose for Himself, it does not make God a mother, He is never addressed by a title Scripture does not give Him, and the picture stays exactly as He gave it. Scripture uses a father's language for Him constantly and a mother's deliberately, and this is one of the motherly ones, and it is His own.

Take that in the reading chair, and know it is not my correction of your ministry, it is the verse doing what it was always doing. You were the one being comforted on Tuesday morning, and the card came second. Isaiah 66:13 was addressed to a person before it was ever addressed to a room, and it is the Holy Spirit who gets a sentence past a man's hands, which no amount of better preparation has ever managed.