I Have Never Said It About Myself

Trevor noticed it in a men's group of six people in somebody's front room, and he has been unable to stop noticing it since.

They were going round. That is what happens. Somebody had picked a verse and they were going round the room, and it got to Trevor, and the sentence he was supposed to read was the Lord is my portion.

He read it. Out loud. Six words.

And then he sat back and something in him said, with complete clarity and in his own voice: you have never once said that about yourself.

He is fifty-one. He has been in church since he was seven. He has read that phrase, in one form or another, hundreds of times. He has sung it. He has heard it preached at least four times that he can name. He has said the word portion in prayer, out loud, in front of people, and meant something by it.

And he has never once, in forty-four years, said that sentence in the first person about his own actual life and had it be true in his mouth while he said it.

He can tell you what it means. He could teach it, and has.

He has not said it.

What got him was two weeks later, at work, when a new lad, about twenty-two, who has been a Christian for about eleven months and has no idea what anybody is supposed to sound like, said in the middle of a completely ordinary conversation about a job going wrong: yeah, but He is what I have got, so it is fine.

He is what I have got, so it is fine.

Trevor stood on a landing with a drill in his hand and did not say anything, and he could not have explained it to a single man in that front room.

And the sentence that arrived, standing there, had nothing to do with the job.

He thought: that lad has been at this for eleven months and it is in his mouth, and I have been at it for forty-four years and it is in my notes.

Let me say the word properly first

Before anything else I want to be plain about what wealth means on this site, because the word is slippery and I would rather be clear than clever with a man standing on a landing with a drill.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a total, not what a man could show you. A portion is the old table word for what is set down in front of somebody because they belong at that table, and Scripture takes that ordinary word and does something startling with it: God says of certain people that He Himself is their portion. That is the only sense the word carries here, and this is the article where that has to get from the page into a man's mouth.

And let me be plain about one thing so nothing gets confused. This is not a piece about needing more feeling, or about praying harder, or about the difference between head and heart, which is a way of putting it that has never once helped anybody I know. If you are genuinely short as well, that is real and deserves a real answer, and impossibleharvest.com in this same family is built for exactly that.

What I want to do is much narrower. I want that sentence in your mouth tonight, and I would rather the word of God put it there, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I talked you into it.

The shortest first-person sentence in the psalms

Psalm one hundred and nineteen is the longest chapter in the Bible and it is mostly about the word of God, and in the middle of it there is a line that is six words long.

The LORD is my portion; I promise to keep your words.Psalm 119:57

I am not going to improve on that, and the Holy Spirit has been carrying it to men who could quote it for three thousand years.

But notice what kind of sentence it is, because that is what a man in a front room needs to see. It is not a description of God. It is not a doctrine about portions. It is a first-person claim, made by one person, about his own life, in five words with a possessive pronoun in the middle of it.

My. That is the whole distance. Everything else in that sentence you already believe and have believed since you were seven, and the written word does not ask for a feeling to go with it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a pronoun across into a mouth.

And notice what he does with the second half. He does not follow it with a feeling. He follows it with a commitment about what he is going to do next, which is the least emotional and most practical thing a man could put there, and it is worth seeing that the psalm does not require anybody to work themselves up first.

You are not a hypocrite for forty-four years. You are somebody who learned the sentence in the third person, correctly, from good people, and has never been handed it in the first, and the written word does not scold anybody for that. It puts a claim in one man's mouth in five words, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between reading it and saying it.

And here is what is true of you tonight, before you feel one thing differently. You have a portion and the pronoun is yours. His word says the LORD is my portion, in the first person, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a settled fact in a man rather than a phrase he could define for you.

What the lad on the landing had

Think about what got you with a drill in your hand. It wasn't the theology. There was no theology in it at all and he would not know the word.

It was: He is what I have got, so it is fine. It was an ordinary sentence, in an ordinary voice, in the middle of complaining about a job, with the pronoun in it and nothing whatsoever made of the fact. You were starving to hear it said like that, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as immaturity, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a man and not merely about him.

That is the honest thing under the front room. It is not doubt. You believe every word of it and you always have. It is that a sentence can live in a man's understanding for forty-four years without ever crossing into his own mouth about his own life, and nobody notices, because he can teach it.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. The pronoun is not presumption. Jesus taught a whole crowd to open their prayer with the word our and then the word Father, which is two possessives before anything is asked for, and He was on that landing before the lad said anything.