I Have Been Holding God to a Date

There is a Bible on the shelf in the front room with a piece of paper in it at Acts sixteen, and on the paper is a date, and the date is nine years ago.

That was the night. He was nineteen and he had come home at four in the morning and she had stood over him while he slept, which she had not done since he was a baby, and she had said the verse out loud over him and then written the date on a piece of paper because a thing with a date on it is a thing you can hold somebody to.

She meant God. She would not have put it that way then.

He is twenty eight now, and he is further away than he has ever been, and there was a Christmas two years ago that she does not talk about.

And what she has been doing for nine years, and only named to herself in the last few months, is running a schedule.

It started small. By his twenty first. Then by the time he is twenty five, because that is when men settle. Then when he has children, because that brings them back. And every time one of those markers went past, something in her got harder, and the praying got shorter and more like a demand, and about a year ago it more or less stopped.

She still goes to church. She still sings. And when they pray for families she stands there with her arms folded, because she has stopped bringing this one, because she is not going to keep presenting a thing she believes has already been declined.

You may have a date on a piece of paper. And what has worn you out may not be the waiting, but the schedule you attached to the waiting without ever admitting you had one.

The word as it stands

Now let me put the verse in front of you exactly as it stands, because you have carried it for nine years with something added to it.

A jailer in Philippi, who has just watched an earthquake and is about to kill himself, asks Paul and Silas what he must do to be saved. And here is the answer.

And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.Acts 16:31

You have a word spoken over that house, and there is no date anywhere inside it. Acts 16:31 says thou and thy house and stops, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the timing, which is why every marker you set went past without His agreement.

What it says and what it does not

It says: believe, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.

It does not say by when. It does not say what the house will do first, or how far a man may go before he comes back, or that anybody's twenty fifth birthday is a marker.

And look at what happens in the very next verses, which people skip: they speak the word to all that were in his house. The household is not converted by the jailer's belief operating on them like a mechanism. They are spoken to, in the same night, and they respond as people.

So the word is real, and it is over a household, and it is not a schedule and it never contained one, and every hardening in you for nine years has come from an appointment God never made.

You have a word spoken over a house and you added a calendar to it. Acts 16:31 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of a Philippian jail and puts it in a front room with a piece of paper in a Bible.

Now let me say the hard part, because this is the landing category and the rule in it is absolute: nothing here is exercised over anybody's will, and that includes a twenty eight year old son's.

I am not going to hand you a way of making him. There is no such way, and if there were, God has declined to use it, and the God who declines to override a will is not going to lend the ability to a mother.

You are released from producing your son's return, and it was never in your hands to produce. Scripture leaves the household spoken to and responding rather than moved like furniture, and the Spirit of God has been the one working in a young man for nine years without reporting to you.

What the folded arms are

And now the arms, because you are the only one who knows about them.

You stand there with your arms folded when they pray for families, and you have told yourself it is because you will not present a declined application again.

It is not that. You are protecting yourself from hope, which is a thing that has hurt you four times, on four dates, that you set yourself.

That is not unbelief and I am not going to call it that. It is a woman who has been burned by her own calendar and has taken the sensible precaution of stopping.

But the calendar was yours. And when it comes down, the hoping does not have to come with it.

You are standing in this covenant and you are not carrying it alone. The word puts it plainly, and that is the plain force of a word spoken over a whole house without a date attached, and His Spirit has been holding both you and him through every marker that went past.