For the mother whose grown son says he doesn't believe, and says it kindly.
Picture a kitchen at half past nine on an ordinary Tuesday evening.
The dishes are done. One chair is still pulled out from the table, the one beside the window, because that is where he always sat and nobody in this house has pushed it back in. His mother stands at the sink with her hands in the water long after the water has gone cold.
He isn't gone, which is the detail that makes it so hard to explain to anybody. He calls on Sundays. He came at Easter and fixed the latch on the back gate without being asked. He is kind, he is well, and he told her in this kitchen, gently, that he doesn't believe any of it and won't pretend he does for her sake.
She told him that was all right, and she meant it. Then she went up the stairs and sat on the edge of the bed with her coat still on.
You know the room I am describing, because you have your own version of it somewhere. Somebody you love has told you kindly that they are not where you are. They weren't cruel about it, and that is the trouble, because cruelty would at least have given you something to push against.
Your believing is doing something real in that house whether or not the person you love ever agrees with a word of it. Long before anybody in your family took a side, the Holy Spirit was already at work there. Scripture records a man brought to Jesus entirely on the faith of other people.
One Word in the Fifth Verse
Let me name the weight before I say anything at all about lifting it, because you have carried it quietly and I won't hurry you past it.
Praying for your own child is the loneliest praying there is. You do it in the car outside the supermarket, or at two in the morning with the landing light on. Nobody asks how it is going, and there would be no way to answer them if they did.
Somewhere in these last years a sentence moved into that kitchen and made itself quite at home. It told you that your faith is a fond old habit the family is gentle about, and that nothing can really move while the one it is for stays exactly where he is.
Here is the line Mark wrote down about a crowded house.
When Jesus saw their faith, he said unto the sick of the palsy, Son, thy sins be forgiven thee.Mark 2:5 (KJV)
Put your finger on the word their and leave it there a moment.
Four men had carried a paralyzed man across a town on a mat. The crowd had the doorway blocked solid, so they went up the outside stair to a flat mud roof and broke it open with their hands. Then they lowered him through the opening into the middle of somebody else's meeting.
The man on the mat says nothing at all. Not one word of his is written down anywhere: he doesn't ask, he doesn't argue, he promises nobody that he will do better afterward. He is carried, he is lowered, and the Lord is the first to speak.
The roof was not his idea. In that fifth verse it is written that Jesus saw their faith, which is a sentence about four pairs of forearms.
You are holding one corner of a mat, and that is a real job to be holding. The Spirit keeps your love from climbing onto the mat and calling control by the name of faith. Scripture gives your corner its weight and asks nobody at your table to sign for it.
Stay in that a while, because it is nearly all of what I have for you today. Heaven read the carrying that afternoon, and it read it in four men whose names were never written down, and it reads it in a woman at a sink with cold water around her wrists.
Mark tells us nothing about what the man believed on the way there, and we won't build past that silence. The account gives nobody permission to overrule another person's will, to get around a kind and clear no, or to settle how any of it ends. It gives one clean picture instead, of people bringing somebody they love to Jesus.
So take this off your shoulders, because it was never put there by God. Your son isn't a project you have fallen behind on, and his honesty with you isn't a sin. His questions belong to him, and God is free to be good to him long before a single one of them is settled. Your prayer was never meant to be persuasion in a softer voice.
What Love Is Allowed to Hold
The tiredness didn't start in praying for him. It came from hearing every gentle Sunday call as another Sunday scored against your praying, and then keeping the count.
Let the count go, and don't pick it up again on Sunday. Where you stand with God was never handed to your family for a decision, and your son's honesty is not an accusation against either of you.
You hold the corner, never the will. Scripture hands you that corner and stops right there, and the Spirit does in a grown man what no careful argument of yours has ever managed.
Here is what love is allowed to hold. You may say his name to God every day you live, offer to pray when he is willing, and let it go without sulking when he isn't. You may cook for him, keep the gate mended, and be the safest person in his whole life.
Here is what love does not get to hold. You don't write what he believes, you don't get around a no he has given you kindly, and you don't read his distance as the sum of your praying. What he does with God is his own, and the timing of it belongs to God alone.
That last one matters, so let me say it plainly rather than let it slide by. His unbelief is not a verdict on your faith, and it is not a crime against you. Your standing is never handed over to another person's answer anywhere in the written Word of God. The Holy Spirit keeps this whole family out of a courtroom that nobody ever called.
Declare this over yourself
You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so what follows is not a claim made out of your own authority. It is agreement, said back to God in His own words, while the Holy Spirit carries it. How He orders the rest of it is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own time.
There is nothing on offer here and nothing to trade for it. You were brought into Christ by a decision that was never yours to make and is not yours to keep making, and a sink of water gone cold at half past nine changes none of that. Say it in the kitchen voice you keep for the kettle and the back gate, plainly and without ceremony. It issues God no instructions, and it puts nothing whatever on your son's calendar.
My son is loved, and he was never a project of mine. Scripture keeps the mat in four sets of hands and keeps the word that healed in only one, so I hold a corner and I do not hold his will. The faith I hold at this cold sink is enough for tonight, and his honesty costs my faith nothing. His questions belong to him rather than to a case I am expected to win. The scorekeeping in this family stops with me, and his distance is not the measure of my praying. The Holy Spirit was in this kitchen before I ever stood at the window, and He never waited on anyone under this roof to say yes. I carry the name, and my son's freedom, the timing and everything God does with both stay His.
Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.
This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.
Mark 2:5
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
