Standing In The Same Water

Every year on the eleventh of March he drives an hour and a half to stand in the water at the same beach.

He is fifty seven. He has done it thirty seven times. His wife knows about it and his children know about it and none of them ask, because the one time his daughter did, when she was about fourteen, he said something short and got in the car, and she never asked again.

When he was twenty, on that beach, on that date, God met him.

He would not use those words in front of most people. What he says, when he says anything, is that he went in the water angry and came out of it clean, and that it took about four minutes, and that he has never had a night like it before or since.

So he goes back. He parks in the same place. He walks down past the same rocks. He stands in up to his knees and he waits, and the water comes in and goes out over his feet the way water does, and after a while he is a fifty seven year old man standing alone in the cold, and then he drives home.

Thirty seven times.

I want to say something gently, because there is nothing foolish in this and I am not laughing at it. A man who drives ninety minutes every year for thirty seven years to stand in cold water is not a man who has stopped wanting God. That is not what is wrong here.

What is wrong is that somewhere in those years he decided the water was the thing that carried it.

His hand went where you went

There is a psalm that reads like a man trying to find a place God is not, and failing, and enjoying failing.

He tries the height of heaven. He tries the grave. Then he tries distance, and he says it beautifully: if I take the wings of the morning and go and live at the far edge of the sea.

Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.Psalm 139:10

Receive that where you are standing. You are held by a hand that never stopped at any shoreline. The word says even there Thy hand shall lead me, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept that true through thirty seven drives home in the dark.

Even there. The far edge of the sea, which for that writer was the end of the known world, and the answer is a hand already on him when he arrives.

So hear it plainly where you are sitting, and understand it is not my kindness, it is His claim: you are held right now, as you read this. His word says His right hand holds you, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes that off the page and lays it on a fifty seven year old chest in a kitchen a hundred miles from any beach.

The hand did not stay at the shoreline in March. Hands do not do that. The hand went to the car park, and up the highway, and into every hard winter you have had since, and it has been on you through years you filed as nothing.

There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who was met by God in a small room on Aldersgate Street while somebody read aloud out of a preface. He wrote that his heart was strangely warmed, and that is the sentence everybody knows. What he did after it is the sentence almost nobody knows.

He built a timetable and then he took it to the people nobody was going to.

Small groups meeting at a fixed hour, where a few people asked each other plain questions out loud. Preaching in open fields because the buildings were closed to him. Standing in the yards outside coal mines at five in the morning while men came up off the night shift with their faces black. Years in prisons, with people who could give him nothing at all. The name that got hung on that movement began as a joke about how methodical they were, and they kept it, because it was true.

He never once went back to stand on Aldersgate Street and wait.

That is the whole thing and it belongs to you tonight. A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and he held both because he understood that what met him in that room was a Person and not a place, and a Person travels.

You are not required to reproduce it. Sit in that, because it is the weight that has been in the car with you every eleventh of March. Nowhere in Scripture is a man commanded to recreate the conditions of his own conversion. His word says His right hand holds you, and it is His Spirit who does the holding, in water and out of it, on the date and off it.

And I will not tell you the beach did not matter. It mattered. He met an angry twenty year old in the ocean because that is where the boy was, and He knew what to do with him, and He did it in four minutes. He is simply under no obligation to use salt water twice on somebody who already heard Him.