No Tremor in My Hands

For the man who was prayed for tonight, drove to the edge of the parking lot, and stopped because nothing inside him had moved.

You are sitting in a parked car with both hands at ten and two on a wheel that isn't going anywhere. The engine is off, the cabin light went dark half a minute ago, and you still haven't opened the door. Across the church parking lot, red tail lamps go out through the gate one pair at a time, and somebody who prayed beside you lifts a hand through their windshield. You lift two fingers back without really looking.

Twenty minutes ago, inside, the room went very quiet around you. Four or five people stood close, one man put a hand on your shoulder, and somebody asked God plainly for the thing you have been carrying since spring. Nobody shouted, nobody made a performance of it, and every word of it was kind.

Now you are waiting for the proof.

Maybe warmth will spread through your chest. Maybe your hands will start to shake, or tears will arrive the way they did for the woman near the front. You watch your knuckles in the faint light off the dashboard and nothing trembles. You check your breathing, which is ordinary. You go looking inside yourself for certainty and find a cabin as blank as the passenger seat.

The last car leaves and the security lamp hums above a wet patch of asphalt.

Your faith is not measured by what your body does after you pray. Scripture puts the weight of your believing on God's ability rather than on your nervous system, and the Holy Spirit keeps that footing under you while your fingers stay perfectly still.

What a Steering Wheel Can Honestly Report

There is a sentence you would never have said inside that building, and you are close to saying it now behind the wheel. It goes something like this: I don't think I did that right.

I want to sit here with you for a minute before anybody answers it, because the sentence deserves the respect of being heard rather than corrected. You were grateful in that circle. You meant every amen you said. Then everybody went home to their kitchens and you stayed in a cold cabin waiting for your body to issue a receipt, and the receipt never printed.

Your hands are witnesses to sensation, and they were never made magistrates over the word of God. They can report cold, pressure, fatigue, the ridges in a steering wheel, the age in your own knuckles. They have no jurisdiction whatsoever to rule on whether the Lord heard you tonight.

You are held right now by a promise that does not run on your pulse. The written Word rests your standing on what God has undertaken to do, and the Holy Spirit keeps that standing alive in a man whose hands never once moved.

The strange part is how organized that accusation sounds when it arrives. It comes with a timeline, a piece of evidence and a conclusion already written at the bottom, as though a still hand were a signed statement about your standing with God. It is nothing of the kind. It is a hand at the end of a long day, resting on a cold wheel in an emptying parking lot.

The stillness in your fingers is real, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It is the verdict you attached to that stillness which has no business being there at all.

Fully Persuaded and Not Fully Stirred

Romans hands us an old man with every natural reason to feel the odds against him.

Abraham had years behind him, a wife past childbearing, and a word from God that ran straight against everything both bodies could report. Scripture does not pretend those facts were invisible to him, because faith has never been make believe. He looked at what was physically true, and then he looked at Someone far greater.

Who against hope believed in hope, that he might become the father of many nations, according to that which was spoken, So shall thy seed be. And being not weak in faith, he considered not his own body now dead, when he was about an hundred years old, neither yet the deadness of Sarah’s womb: He staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief; but was strong in faith, giving glory to God; And being fully persuaded that, what he had promised, he was able also to perform.Romans 4:18-21 (KJV)

Notice exactly where that sentence puts the weight. It does not say Abraham became fully stirred, or fully warmed, or fully overcome. It says he became fully persuaded, and the persuasion rested on God's ability to perform rather than on Abraham's ability to generate an inner condition.

That difference will put air back into a tired man's lungs at half past nine in an empty parking lot.

You are entirely welcome in God's presence with an ordinary heart rate. Scripture seats your welcome in the finished work of Christ, and the Holy Spirit holds you there without requiring your body to sign anything.

Sometimes trust does arrive with tears, with warmth across the shoulders, with a peace so tangible you could nearly set it on the passenger seat beside you. Receive every one of those gifts gladly when they come, and thank God for them out loud. Just never promote a gift into a judge. A tremor may accompany faith, and a tremor was never able to certify it.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

Written by Elias This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.