Say It With Your Own Mouth

The room was empty because he was painting it, and there was one chair in the middle of the floor because you need somewhere to put the roller tray and somewhere to sit while it dries.

He sat down at about four in the afternoon with the window open and the whole house quiet, and it occurred to him, with no warning at all, that he had believed this for eleven years and had never once said so out loud.

Not to anybody. Not to God. Not in the car, not at a funeral, not on the two occasions he nearly did. Eleven years of praying in the flat interior voice a person uses for thinking. Eleven years of reading, agreeing, going, sitting three rows back, meaning every word of every hymn and never once opening his mouth on the actual thing.

He had reasons, and they were all the same reason wearing different coats. He was waiting for a better moment. Something with a bit of weight to it. A weekend away, or a service where they ask, or an evening when he felt clean enough and sure enough and moved enough for it to count properly.

Earlier that week he had watched two men settle a thing over a fence at the end of the garden. Something about a tree, or a drain, he never found out. They talked for six or seven minutes and then one of them said a sentence and put his hand out, and the other one took it, and that was the end of it. Nothing written. No paper. Two men said words out loud in front of each other in an ordinary garden on an ordinary Wednesday, and the thing was done, and everybody in both houses knew it was done.

He had sat with his tea and thought: I have never done that. Not with God. I have thought it for eleven years and I have never said it where I could hear myself.

You know if this is you, and you probably knew by the third paragraph.

You believe it. That is not in question and I am not going to spend a word arguing you into anything. You just have never said it out loud, and there is now a slight strangeness about the whole subject, because the longer a thing goes unsaid the more of an occasion it seems to need. So you have quietly moved it to a future room: a better day, a stronger week, a service where somebody else starts it.

Let me show you why the mouth is not a formality, and why the room you are in is the room.

A whole nation answered out loud

Look at how a covenant actually gets closed, because there is always a moment where somebody speaks.

An oath is sworn at a mountain. Terms are read out, aloud, in front of everybody, and then the people answer. Not in their hearts. Out loud, together, so that the answer is a thing that happened in the air where other people could hear it.

And he took the book of the covenant, and read in the audience of the people: and they said, All that the LORD hath said will we do, and be obedient.Exodus 24:7

Nobody there thought their speech created the covenant. God swore it. It was His oath, at His cost, and their answering did not manufacture a single word of it.

But the answering was still how they entered it. The oath is His and the answer is ours, and one does not become the other. That is the shape of the whole thing, and it is why nothing in this message is going to ask you to produce anything except a sentence.

So you are standing at the answering, not at the swearing, and the swearing was finished long before you got here. Exodus 24:7 puts an ordinary crowd's ordinary voices at the closing of the thing, and the Holy Spirit is doing exactly that in a painted room this afternoon: turning a settled oath into something a person says back.

A woman on a road, with nobody watching

Now the smallest version of it, and my favorite.

Two widowed women on a dusty road at a border, arguing. The older one is telling the younger one to go home, and she is right to, and she says it three times. There is no ceremony here. No priest, no altar, no witnesses, no building. Two tired women and a bag each.

And the younger one says it out loud.

Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.Ruth 1:16

That is a covenant sentence spoken on a road by somebody with no standing to speak it, at a moment nobody would have chosen, in front of an audience of one who was actively trying to talk her out of it.

And it held. Everything that woman is remembered for came after that sentence, and none of it came before.

You have a mouth, and Ruth 1:16 shows exactly how little a moment needs to be for it to be the moment. The Spirit of God has never once required a room with the right lighting; He requires nothing you cannot do in a chair in the middle of a floor with the window open.

The mouth is the appointed means, not a performance

Here is the sentence that puts it beyond doubt.

That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.Romans 10:9

Confess with thy mouth. Believe in thine heart. Both are there and neither is decoration.

Now be careful with this, because two wrong readings sit either side of it. One says the words are magic, that a formula gets recited and something is triggered. That is not what is being described and it never was; there is no set of syllables in Scripture that anybody has to get right.

The other wrong reading says the mouth does not matter, that God knows the heart and speech is a formality for people who like ceremony. But God, who certainly knows the heart, put the mouth in the sentence anyway. He appointed a means. A thing believed and never said stays in a private room where it cannot be answered, and He made human beings the sort of creature that becomes sure of a thing by hearing itself say it.

Right now, as you read, the requirement of a better moment is being lifted off you. It is written that the confession is with the mouth, plainly and without conditions attached about the setting, and the Holy Spirit is not standing at the door of a future occasion. He is here, in this hour, waiting for a sentence.