Every single person in that church knows what Denise wants to do, because Denise has told every single one of them.
She has told them at the door. She has told them in the car park. She told the visiting speaker about it in the corridor and kept him there eleven minutes, and he did not mind, because when Denise talks about this thing her whole face changes and she gets louder and her hands start moving and you find yourself agreeing with her before you have worked out what you are agreeing to.
It is a good thing she wants to do. I am not going to tell you what it is, because you have your own, and if I name hers you will spend the rest of this comparing.
She has been saying it for nine years.
And one Wednesday, sitting in her own kitchen with a cold cup of tea, she opened the app to check something else entirely, and she scrolled, and the scrolling did the thing scrolling does.
Nine years of a life came past her in a column. And there was nothing on it. Not a line. Not a small one, not a hopeful one, not a single item anywhere in nine years that had anything to do with the thing she has been describing to strangers in corridors since her youngest was in primary school.
She did not cry. Denise is not a crier. She sat there with the tea going cold and said, out loud, to nobody, "Well."
Now listen to me, because right here is where the enemy of your soul would love to get a word in, and I am going to shut that door before he opens it.
Denise is not a fraud.
She has not been performing for nine years. She was not lying in the corridor and she was not lying in the car park, and if you handed her that dream tomorrow she would give the rest of her life to it and never look back once. The love is real. It has always been real. It is one of the truest things about her.
She has just never had anywhere to put it. And a love with nowhere to go turns into talk, because talk is free and talk is available at the door of a church on a Sunday, and a woman with something burning in her is going to put it somewhere.
That is not hypocrisy. That is a fire in a room with no chimney.
So hear me, because you have your own version of this. You have been saying something for a long time. Years, maybe. People know you by it. And you sat down one day with a page in front of you and there was nothing on it, anywhere, that had ever once agreed with your own mouth.
Nobody is calling you a hypocrite. That word does not belong anywhere near you today.
The love is real. It has simply been living entirely on speech.
Guard the heart, because the heart is a spring and not a safe
There is a verse everybody half-knows and hardly anybody hears.
Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.Proverbs 4:23
We hear that as "protect your feelings", as though the heart were a valuable in a safe that has to be defended from burglars.
That is not the picture. The word there is a spring, a source, a place where water comes out of the ground. Out of it are the issues of life, the outflowings, the things that come running out and go somewhere. To keep a spring is not to seal it. It is to watch where the water is going, because the water is going somewhere whether anybody is watching or not.
And now hear what is already true over you, because this is the ground everything else stands on. You are not a woman with a dead heart trying to work up a live one. That is not my flattery, that is the written word's own verdict over anybody in Christ: He takes out the stone and gives a heart of flesh, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who is pressing that into you as you read it. Your spring is not dry. It never has been. It has just been running off down a drive with nobody watching.
And hear the other half too, because half of us need it more. You are not behind. Nine years is not a verdict and it is not a sentence you have to serve. The word says God restores the years the locusts ate, and His Spirit is entirely able to do more in one obedient Wednesday than a woman managed in nine years of corridors.
Nothing about you needs replacing. Something needs a channel.
The verse runs downhill
Here is the thing near everybody has backwards, and backwards it will exhaust you.
We say it like the Lord told us: get your heart right, and then the treasure will follow. Which lays the whole load on manufacturing a feeling, and Denise does not have a feeling problem. Denise has more feeling about this than the rest of that church put together.
He said it the other way round. Where the treasure is, there the heart will be. The treasure goes first. The heart comes after it, and settles.
You are not shut out behind an emotion you cannot summon. That is the plain direction of the written word, and the Holy Spirit put it in that order on purpose, because He knows how many people are sitting in kitchens tonight with a cold cup of tea and a fire nobody can see.
You move something small in the right direction. The heart follows it home.
And I am not going to tell you what to move, or how much, or in what proportion, because I do not know your life and it is not mine to say and the moment I said it you would be taking financial instruction out of a message about your soul. That is not what this is.
I am telling you that talk is not the only place your fire is allowed to go.
So here is the moment, and it is much smaller than a woman who has been talking for nine years expects it to be.
Read one line out loud.
Not a plan. Not a promise, not a vow made standing up at ten o'clock at night, and not another speech at the door on Sunday, because you have made those and they were all sincere and not one of them ever made it onto the page. One line off that statement, spoken into the air of the room you are sitting in, so it stops being a figure in a column and becomes a sentence about a life.
Something happens to a thing when it is said out loud that does not happen when it is read. That is why He gave us confession and not merely agreement, and it is His Spirit who makes a spoken word land in a body rather than glance off it.
And that dream is already yours to put something behind. Heaven is not withholding permission and never was. The word says every good and perfect gift comes down from the Father of lights, and the Spirit is the one who lets a daughter spend like a daughter in her own Father's house instead of like a woman standing at the gate hoping to be noticed.
You are not asking for something new here. He put that fire in you Himself, and what He starts He finishes, says the word, and His Spirit has been keeping it lit for nine years in a kitchen where nobody was clapping.
Give it a chimney. That is the whole move.
Declare this over yourself
- Nine years of talk, you are not the whole of my love and you never were. Scripture says out of the heart come the issues of life, so you were only ever the sound of a spring running with nobody watching where it went.
- Old accusation of fraud, get out of this kitchen in the name of Jesus. You have been calling me a performer for having a fire and no chimney, and a woman with something burning in her is not a liar.
- Lord, my heart follows my treasure, so I am moving the treasure, and what I say I love and what I fund are becoming the same thing. You kept that fire lit for nine years in a room where nobody was clapping, and cutting the channel is what I am doing today.
Proverbs 4:23
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