You Do Not Know What Is In Me

Somebody said it again on Tuesday, in a corridor, and meant it kindly, and it went in like a splinter.

You are a good man.

He has been hearing some version of that since he was about thirty. He is forty seven now. He is the person people call. He has sat with four different families through the worst nights of their lives and he does not talk about any of it. He drives people places. He notices things. If you polled forty people who know him you would get forty of the same answer.

And he knows what is in him at four in the afternoon on a bad day.

He would not tell you what it is and it is not the point of this. It is not a crime and it is not an addiction and nobody is in danger. It is a set of thoughts that arrive when he is tired, about people he loves, and they are cold and they are contemptuous and they are, as far as he can tell, entirely his own.

He has never told anybody. Not one person, in seventeen years.

And here is the actual difficulty, which is not the thoughts.

Every time somebody says you are a good man, he does two things in about a second. He accepts it out loud, because you have to. And he files it under things people believe because they do not have the information. And the second one has been happening several times a month for seventeen years, and what has built up is not humility, it is a private conviction that he is running a very long confidence trick on everybody who loves him.

He is sitting in his truck in a hospital lot at half past four, which is where he does most of his thinking, and the light is coming across the dashboard.

You have that four in the afternoon version of yourself. And you have the compliment problem: the thing people say, and the thing you do with it in the second after they say it. There is a sentence at the end of Romans where Paul says something about a whole church that nobody would ever say about themselves.

I am persuaded that ye are full of goodness

I have to be careful here, and considerably more careful than usual, because this is the exact place where somebody normally prescribes. Work on your thought life. Take every thought captive as a daily practice. Get accountable. I am not going to do that, and here is why: goodness is on the list in Galatians as fruit the Spirit grows, and a man who takes it on as a program will spend the next seventeen years managing his interior and getting better at hiding the four o'clock version, which is precisely what he is already doing.

Paul, at the end of a letter in which he has spent sixteen chapters being extremely honest about what is in people, writes this: And I myself also am persuaded of you, my brethren, that ye also are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge, able also to admonish one another (Romans 15:14).

Full of goodness. He says it about a real congregation, in a real city, that he has just finished writing eleven chapters of doctrine to because they were getting things wrong.

And notice the two verbs. Full, and filled. Neither of them is a verb a person does to themselves. You do not fill yourself; a thing is filled, by somebody, with something that comes from outside it.

You have been filled with something you did not manufacture. That is not me making Paul kinder than he is; Romans 15:14 says full of goodness about people whose problems fill the same letter, and the Holy Spirit who carried that into the text did not attach a proviso about their four in the afternoon.

And read who is persuaded. I myself also am persuaded of you. Paul is not flattering them and he is not being polite. He is stating a conviction, about people he has just corrected at length, and he holds both at the same time without difficulty.

And I myself also am persuaded of you, my brethren, that ye also are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge, able also to admonish one another.Romans 15:14

Both things are true and only one is yours

Now the thing about the four o'clock version.

He is right about it. That is worth saying plainly, because a man who has been honest with himself for seventeen years will not accept anything that starts by telling him he is imagining it. Those thoughts arrive, and they are cold, and they are his.

And Paul writes to people whose interiors he knows about and calls them full of goodness, and both of those are true at once, and the second one is the one that came from somewhere else.

That is the whole difficulty in a sentence: he has been treating the worst thing in him as the truest thing in him, on the grounds that it is the thing nobody else can see. Hiddenness is not the same as accuracy. A thing is not more true for being secret.

You have never been most accurately described by whatever is in you at four in the afternoon. Romans 7:20 has Paul saying that if he does what he does not want, it is no more he that does it, but sin that dwells in him, which is a man distinguishing between himself and what is in him; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) drew that distinction in Scripture so that a man would not have to be the worst thing he can find.

This is yours right now, in a truck in a hospital lot: a goodness that was put in you and is not your production. Galatians 5:22 lists goodness among the fruit of the Spirit; the Spirit who inspired that phrase named the source in the phrase.

Seventeen years of filing

Let me stay with the second thing he does when somebody compliments him, because it is the machinery.

He files it under things people believe without the information. Every time. Several times a month. Seventeen years, which is somewhere north of a thousand instances of quietly overruling everybody who knows him.

A thousand people cannot all be wrong about a man, and one man at four in the afternoon on a bad day is not a more reliable witness than all of them, and he has never once let that stand.

You were never appointed the sole assessor of your own goodness. 1 Corinthians 4:3 has Paul saying it is a small thing to be judged by others, and then adding that he does not even judge himself, which removes the one judge a man trusts most; the Holy Spirit who carried that into the letter took the gavel out of Paul's own hand.

Fruit is not output, and a corridor is where the difference shows. Output would be a stretch of months with no cold thoughts, which he cannot produce and should not try to. Fruit is what has grown on a man who sat with four families through the worst nights of their lives, and John 15:4 says the branch cannot bear fruit of itself.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. On the drive you already make, tell Him one true thing about four in the afternoon with nothing asked for and no resolution attached. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. Nobody grades that, and He already knows.