They Printed My Testimony

Page eleven, with a photograph. She is wearing a yellow top and she is laughing at whoever was holding the camera, and the headline above it is four words long and she can still see them if she closes her eyes.

Her aunt edited that magazine for nineteen years and asked her, over a plate of food, whether she would tell her story properly, and she said yes because you do not say no to that woman.

She told it properly. Twelve hundred words. It was good and it was true and there is a paragraph near the end where she says what she will never do again and what that church will be to her for the rest of her life.

They printed four hundred copies.

That is the number she thinks about. Four hundred, and this is the kind of church where people do not throw things away, so they are in drawers and Bibles and on refrigerators, and one of them is laminated in the church office because her aunt laminated it.

She did the thing again, comprehensively, within eighteen months.

Four years now since she walked into that building. She goes to a bigger church on the other side of town where nobody knows her and she sits near the back and she has never once given her name to anybody there.

And what she says to herself, on the way past that first church, is: it is still in their houses.

You may have something on paper. Or on a video somebody posted, or in a testimony night somebody recorded, and it may be sitting in other people's houses, and you may have organized your entire life around a document you cannot recall.

A word that means what you are afraid of

Now let me put a verse in front of you, and I want to explain one word in it, because the English is doing a poor job and the word is exactly your fear.

Peter is quoting Isaiah about the stone laid in Zion.

Wherefore also it is contained in the scripture, Behold, I lay in Sion a chief corner stone, elect, precious: and he that believeth on him shall not be confounded.1 Peter 2:6

You are not confounded, and that is stated about the exact experience you are living in. 1 Peter 2:6 uses the word for being publicly shown up and denies it over the one who believes, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has settled that while a page sat in an office.

Confounded

That word is old and we have lost it, and people read it as confused, which is not it at all.

Confounded is what happens to a person who is publicly shown up. It is the state of somebody whose claim has been tested in front of everybody and found not to hold. It is the exact experience of a woman whose testimony is on page eleven of four hundred copies and whose life then contradicted it.

That is the word Scripture reaches for. And the sentence says the one who believes on Him shall not be that.

Which is a startling thing to say, because at the level of appearances you obviously were. Everybody with a copy could see it. The claim was tested and did not hold.

And Scripture says: not confounded. Which means it is describing something that is true underneath the appearances and in a different court, and that is precisely the distinction this whole category rests on.

You are not confounded, and that is stated about the exact experience you are living in. 1 Peter 2:6 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of a letter to scattered believers and puts it beside a woman looking at her own photograph.

Now let me deal with the four hundred copies, because you have made them into a jury and they are not one.

A copy in a drawer is a piece of paper. It has no opinion. The people who own those drawers have lives, and most of them could not tell you what was on page eleven of anything, and the handful who remember are not conducting proceedings, they are getting on with their Tuesdays.

But here is the part that matters more: even if every one of those four hundred people had read it that morning and remembered every line, it would not change your standing by a millimeter, because none of them were the party. You told that story to a room and to a magazine. You gave your word to God.

You are answerable to the one you gave your word to and not to four hundred drawers. Scripture puts the not being confounded on believing on Him rather than on the record holding up, and the Spirit of God has been settling that for four years while you sat at the back of a bigger church.

Your aunt laminated it

And the lamination, because that is the detail that is actually doing the damage, and you have never said so.

Your aunt laminated it. Which means she was proud. Which means what you cannot face is not four hundred strangers but one woman who edited a magazine for nineteen years and put your face in it and covered it in plastic so it would last.

You are not hiding from a readership. You are hiding from somebody's pride in you, which is a much heavier thing and much harder to admit, because it sounds like vanity when you say it out loud and it is not vanity at all.

You are settled with God this morning, and one woman's pride was never the tribunal. Scripture says it in so many words, and that is the plain force of a promise that names public exposure and denies it, and His Spirit is the one who has done the settling while a laminated page sat in an office.