The Footings Are Still In

The box came down out of the loft on a Tuesday because he was looking for the drill, and the drill was not in it.

What was in it was three ring binders, a spiral notebook with a coffee ring dried onto the cover, and forty one weeks of Wednesday night handouts from a course he sat through for three years. He put the lid back on and stood at the bottom of the ladder with his hand flat on top of it. Then he carried it through to the kitchen anyway.

It has been on the table ever since. It is half past eleven at night now, and there are two piles where the fruit bowl usually sits. Left hand pile: things he still believes, and he is quietly surprised how tall it is. Right hand pile: things he does not, and some of those he is angry about, and one page he has read four times tonight to be certain he read it right the first time.

Then there is the sheet he cannot put on either pile, which is the actual reason he is still up. Every time he lifts something off the right hand stack the whole table seems to shift under his forearms, and underneath the sorting is a question he has never said out loud to a living soul. If he keeps pulling, does he get to the bottom of that box and find that God was in the right hand pile the whole time.

That is your table. That is your hour. And there is something nobody said to you on the night they handed you the binder, so I am going to say it now.

What a demolition actually takes down

I keep buildings. Footings, drains, roof timbers, load ratings. So let me talk about buildings for a minute, because it will serve you better tonight than an argument would, and an argument is the last thing you need from anybody.

When a building comes down, people picture a hole. That is not what a site looks like the next morning. The frame goes in a day, the walls go in a skip, and then the machines stop and everyone stands about on a slab that is still there, still level, still rated for a load, because footings go deeper than anything you can see from the road and the wrecking never gets down that far.

Now hear the weight you are actually carrying, because I do not think it is doubt. You could live with doubt. What you cannot live with is not knowing which of your own thoughts are yours. Every sentence you have ever prayed came to you in a certain vocabulary, from a certain voice, at a certain volume, and now you cannot tell where the teaching stops and where God starts. That is a particular kind of tired. It does not look like anything from the outside. It just means you sit up.

And here is what nobody told you. You did not pour that footing and you did not frame the house on top of it either. You were handed a building that was already up. Somebody had decided where the walls went, chosen the words you would pray in, marked which questions were the safe ones to ask out loud. You walked into rooms built before you got there and you loved God in them, honestly, with everything you had. That much I would stake anything on, and nothing that has come down since has touched it.

So when the framing comes away, the fear underneath is not really about doctrine. It is that there was nothing but frame. That the God you have loved was a room somebody built rather than the ground the whole thing stood on.

For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.1 Corinthians 3:11

Read that again the way a builder reads a specification, because one word in it is doing all of the work and it is not the word foundation. It is the word can.

Not: no man should lay another foundation. Not: no man may. No man can. Framing is inside the trade. Men have framed well and men have framed badly, and all of it, the good and the bad alike, is framing. Nobody has ever once got down to that depth with a shovel.

Now the other half of it, which is the half you came for. A thing no hand laid is a thing no hand lifts. If a man could put a foundation in, a man could take one out, and then every page you turn over tonight would be load bearing and you would be right to be frightened. Whatever you were handed, and however it was handed to you, it was all worked above ground.

Then look at what the foundation is. Not a true statement about Christ, which is what the sentence could easily have said. Which is Jesus Christ. A Person. That is why He will not go on either pile: a pile is for claims, and you cannot fact check a Person into the right hand stack. He is not one of the things on the table. He is what the table is standing on.

And a Person is who has been sitting up with you. The Holy Spirit is in that kitchen at half past eleven, and He did not arrive when you opened the box. You are taught by Him tonight, at this table, with no course running and no room to sit in, because the written word says the anointing you have received of Him abides in you and teaches you all things. You are not sorting alone and you never have been. The One who is under the house is also the One in the chair beside you, and He has read every page on both piles already.

Isaiah had already put it that way, centuries before there was a handout to argue with. Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation. Notice the verb and who owns it: I lay. And then the line I would give you above every other line tonight, because it fits the hour you are keeping.

He that believeth shall not make haste.

A man standing on a sure foundation is not a man who has to hurry. You have been sorting at that speed because underneath it you believe the ground is only good while you can still defend it, and it was never offered to you on those terms. Take a week over that box. Take a year. The footing was not poured on the condition that you reach a conclusion about it.

Two things are true in that kitchen tonight, and neither of them is a debate.

The first is that God did not go quiet when the building did. He is not an artefact of that room and He did not need the course in order to exist. He was there before it, and He is here after it, at this hour, with the pencil down. His Spirit is the One who kept you praying through a year in which you did not trust a single word you had been given to pray with, and the word says He helps our infirmities and makes intercession for us when we do not know what to ask. You have been carried through this whole sort by a Helper you could not see working.

The second is the one you actually need. What you are standing on is not your certainty about Him. It is Him. He is under that table in the middle of an unfinished sort, tonight, and He is under it for the version of you that cannot explain himself yet, with a sheet in his hand he cannot label.