The Bible Open After the Music Stops

For the worshipper still standing when the last chord fades, dry eyed, doing quiet arithmetic about everybody else in the room.

In a rented upper room in Rome, somebody unrolled a letter and began to read it out loud by lamplight. The people crowded in to hear it were utterly ordinary. There were dockworkers with sore shoulders, a woman with flour still dried on her knuckles, and two servants leaning against the wall because every stool was taken.

Nobody in that room possessed a private copy of anything. Faith reached them through their ears, in a borrowed room, from a page they would never hold themselves.

Some of them wept while the letter was read. Others stood there tired and blank, went home to their beds afterward with nothing stirring in their chests, and the word that had gone into them was exactly the same word.

Beloved, I want you to see that room, because you've been standing in a version of it tonight. The final chord has faded in your own hall, and people around you are wiping their faces while somebody laughs through tears. You stand with both hands at your sides feeling precisely what you felt when the first hymn began, which is tired feet, dry eyes and nothing lifting anywhere.

Then comes the arithmetic you never say out loud. They felt something and I did not, so their faith must be alive and mine must be failing.

Your faith is not measured by what your body did while the music filled the hall. The Holy Spirit has been at work in a dry eyed woman for the whole hour. Scripture puts faith on the word of God that reached your ears, never on the response it raised in your chest.

What Arrived Through Their Ears

Paul gave that Roman room one sentence about how any of this arrives in a person in the first place.

So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.Romans 10:17 (KJV)

Read where he positions the source. Faith comes by hearing, and the hearing comes by the word of God, and neither half of that sentence mentions how the hearer happens to feel while it lands. He could have written that faith comes by weeping, or by warmth, or by the particular hush that falls on a room during the last verse. He wrote none of it.

That isn't because your tears are unwelcome. God made your tears, He collects them, and there are whole psalms that would be dishonest without them. It is because tears were never the delivery mechanism, and something in you has been treating them as though they were.

You have been receiving all evening from a source your feelings do not control. Faith comes by hearing, and the hearing by the word of God, and it is written that way with no mention of tears anywhere in the sentence. The Holy Spirit carries it into a heart that registers nothing at the time.

Consider what that means for the last ninety minutes of your life. Every line you sang was doctrine entering through your own ears. Every verse read from the front was the word of God arriving at the one address Scripture actually names. None of it was suspended because your eyes stayed dry and your shoulders never loosened.

Receiving rarely announces itself, and it never has. A good meal feeds the man who ate it without tasting much of it, and the word of God can land squarely in a tired believer who felt nothing whatever while it was being read aloud.

The Chord Stops and the Word Does Not

Musicians are coiling cables now and somebody has turned the house lights up. The room looks smaller and more ordinary than it did twenty minutes ago, which is the way every hall looks after the music stops.

On the chair beside you there is an open Bible with its thin page stirring in the draft from a floor vent. Put your hand there, beloved. Not to manufacture a moment, and not to silence the disappointment sitting in your throat, but because the music has stopped and the word has not.

I want to be very careful with you here, because messages on this subject usually overcorrect and leave a person ashamed of feeling anything. Nobody is asking you to go cold on purpose. Emotion is not a lesser grade of worship, and the woman weeping in the second row is not doing something questionable.

Feeling genuinely moves people, and God made it to move them. He isn't embarrassed by a room full of tears, and He isn't embarrassed by a woman standing in the middle of it with nothing happening.

You are fully welcome in the presence of God with a quiet body and dry eyes. The Holy Spirit holds you there through a completely ordinary evening. Scripture seats that welcome in the finished work of Christ, never in your response to a melody.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

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