The Man Who Cannot Say I Do Not Know

Fourteen years at the front and he has never once said it.

He has said things that sound like it. That is a great question. There is a lot of debate about that. I would want to think about that more carefully.

Every one of those is a maneuver and he knows it, because he can feel himself choose them.

What he has never said, plainly, with nothing after it, is: I do not know.

He carries two questions. He could tell you both in about nine words each. One is about something in the text that he has read fourteen ways and none of them have settled it. The other one is about a woman in that congregation and what happened to her daughter, and that question does not have a version that could be asked politely.

He has never put either of them to anybody. Not to the man he is supposedly accountable to. Not to his wife.

There was a night, about three years ago, when he nearly said one of them out loud to a friend in a car, and the friend's phone rang, and by the time it was over the moment had gone, and he was so relieved that he has thought about the relief ever since.

He is good at this. That is not false modesty in reverse, it is simply true: he is a good man doing a hard job well, and people are better for being under him.

And he has been holding two things by himself for a long time.

Both halves, in one breath

Let me sit down beside you before I open anything, because you have spent fourteen years being the one who sits beside everybody else.

You are not a fraud. I want that dealt with in the first minute, because it is what you suspect at about two in the morning, and it is not true and it is not even close.

A man with two unresolved questions who keeps showing up and doing the work is not a fraud. He is a man carrying something alone who was never designed to.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as permission: you are not required to be resolved in order to be trusted, and there is a father in that ninth chapter of Mark who says both halves in one breath. That is not me being kind, it is what stands written, and the same Holy Spirit who has kept you steady at the front for fourteen years is in the side room with you now.

Read what the man says. It is one of the most human sentences anybody says in any of those accounts.

Immediately the boy's father exclaimed, "I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!"Mark 9:24

I do believe. Help my unbelief.

Both. In one sentence, out loud, in front of people, to His face.

And here is what does not happen next: he is not corrected. Nobody takes him aside about the second half. The thing he came for is done, and the account keeps his sentence exactly as he said it, unedited, with the contradiction left standing in the middle of it.

So take this now rather than after the questions come out: your unresolved things do not disqualify you from standing where you stand, because the written word keeps a man's honest half-and-half sentence without one word of rebuke, and the Spirit of God has been working through you for fourteen years while both of those questions have been sitting there.

And the guard, because there is a careless version of this that would do harm to people you are responsible for.

Nothing here says stand up on Sunday and unload. You carry a real weight for real people, and there is a difference between honesty and using a congregation as your own pastoral care, and you already know that difference better than I could explain it.

What is written simply never makes certainty the entry requirement, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a man to be finished in order to use him.