Four Weeks With Your Mouth Shut

Third row, aisle end, the same spot he has stood in for eleven years.

He stands. He holds the sheet or looks at the screen. He does not sing.

Four weeks now, and it started on a specific Sunday, with a specific line. The song said something about God being good all the time, which is a true thing that he believes, and on that particular morning, seventeen days after the thing that happened in his family, he opened his mouth and could not make himself say it.

Not because he had stopped believing it. Because saying it in that room, at that volume, with his face arranged that way, would have been claiming something about how he was that was not the case.

He is a truthful man. That is the entire origin of this. He would rather stand in silence than sing a sentence he cannot presently mean.

So he stands, and he does not sing, and his wife has noticed and has said nothing, and one of the men on the sound desk has noticed and has said nothing, and he is aware that he is becoming a slightly conspicuous silent man in the third row.

And what he has begun to think is this: that until he can sing it honestly he should not sing it at all, and that this might be a long time.

That is an admirable instinct and it is going to cost him a great deal, and there is something in the letter to the Hebrews that he has read a hundred times and never once applied to a Sunday morning.

It is called a sacrifice

There is a line near the end of Hebrews, written to people under real pressure, and the noun in it is the thing everybody skips.

By him therefore let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God continually, that is, the fruit of our lips giving thanks to his name.Hebrews 13:15

Take that in the third row. You have something to bring that Scripture has already named. The word calls it the sacrifice of praise, offered continually, and it is the Holy Spirit who receives it, and He never asked for a full heart first.

The sacrifice of praise.

Think about what a sacrifice is. It is not an expression of a feeling. It is a thing that costs you, brought and put down on purpose, and the entire concept assumes it is expensive and that you do it anyway.

Nobody in the Old Testament brought a lamb because they were in the mood for it.

Which means the writer is not describing praise that overflows from a full heart. That kind is wonderful and it needs no encouragement and nobody would call it a sacrifice, because it costs nothing. He is describing praise offered by people for whom it is expensive, and he says do it continually, which is a word aimed straight at seasons rather than moments.

So take this in the third row, and know it is not my argument, it is what is written: what you would be doing on Sunday if you opened your mouth is named in Scripture and it is called a sacrifice. His word says let us offer the sacrifice of praise continually, the fruit of our lips, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it, whether the man offering it feels anything at all.

Now, the honesty problem, because your instinct is right and I do not want to trample it.

You are afraid that singing God is good while your life is not good would be a lie. But look at what the sentence actually claims. It says something about God. It does not say anything about your circumstances or about how you are doing, and it never did.

If it said I feel good about God this morning, you would be right to shut your mouth. It says He is good. And you told me, in the second paragraph, that you believe that.

Singing a true thing you believe while you feel terrible is not lying. It is testimony given under hard conditions, which is the only kind that ever impressed anybody.

There was a family in England in the seventeen hundreds who wrote six thousand hymns, mostly for people whose lives were extremely hard.

They wrote for miners and for women burying children. They put doctrine in tunes precisely because a person in that condition cannot generate anything on their own, and needs a true sentence handed to them to carry until it comes back around.

The words are ahead of you. That is the whole design. They are not a report on your inside; they are a rope thrown from somewhere further along.

The name that got attached to those people started as mockery of how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was accurate.

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and the hymn was the hinge in exactly your kind of month.