There is a sentence about his son that he has never said to another human being.
Not to his wife. Not to his brother, who he tells everything to. Not to the counselor they saw for four sessions in 2019 and stopped seeing, partly, though he has never admitted this, because he was getting close to saying it.
It is nine words long. He knows exactly how long it is because he has counted them, lying on his back at three in the morning, more times than he could tell you.
I am not going to guess what yours is. I know some of them, because people eventually say them to me. They are things like: I do not like who he has become. Or: I am relieved when she does not come home. Or: I think I did this. Or: some part of me stopped hoping in 2021 and I have been performing hope ever since.
They are not monstrous. That is what nobody tells you. Every one of them is an ordinary human being's ordinary grief wearing a coat that makes it look like a crime.
But he has carried his for nine years, and in those nine years the sentence has done what a sentence does when it is never let out. It has grown. It has become, in his head, the thing that would end his marriage, or end his standing in his family, or reveal that he is not the man everybody thinks.
He is not a coward. I want that clear. He is a man protecting his son from a sentence, and he has been doing it at his own expense every single night for nine years, and there is a kind of love in it even though it is killing him.
The verse is one to another, not one to a hundred
There is a line in James that has been used badly enough over the years that some people flinch at it, so let us read what it actually says and what it does not.
Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed.James 5:16
Hear that over yourself at three in the morning. You are held with those nine words in you and not in spite of them. The word says confess your faults one to another, that ye may be healed, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the healing in that room.
One to another. Not one to the congregation. Not one to a leader with authority over your life. One to another, which is the language of two people at the same height, and the promise attached to it is healing, not exposure.
And notice what it does not say. It does not say confess in order to qualify for healing. There is no toll booth in that sentence. It describes what happens in a room where truth is spoken between people who are not going anywhere: something in a person comes back together.
So hear this where you are lying, and know it is not my reassurance, it is written: you are already forgiven, already His, already held, right now, as you read this, and the sentence you are holding has not changed one word of that. His word says there is no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a settled fact at three in the morning and not a doctrine you agree with in daylight.
There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who had a night in a small meeting where his heart was strangely warmed. Everyone quotes it. What he built afterward almost nobody quotes, and the beam that held the whole structure up was not the preaching.
It was six or seven people in a room, once a week, called a class meeting.
Nobody taught. There was no platform in it and no expert. A handful of ordinary people sat down and were asked, out loud, how it really stood with them, and they said, and the others heard it, and nothing was carried out of that room. That was the actual engine of a movement that changed a nation. Not the crowds in the fields. The rooms of six.
The name that got fastened to those people started as a joke about their methodical habits. They kept it, because it fit.
A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and the hinge was a small number of people telling the truth to each other where it would not travel.
Now hear me carefully, because this is where I will not push you. I am not telling you to find a group. I am not telling you to tell your wife tonight. I am not handing you a program or a night of the week. His word says one to another, and it is His Spirit who chooses the person and the hour, and one safe person is the whole of what is being asked.
Nine years in the dark is what has made it enormous. Not the content of it.
And nine years of dark is what made it enormous, not the content of it. Scripture says confess your faults one to another, that ye may be healed, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the healing once a thing is in the air.
Because here is what happens when a sentence stays inside one head. It never gets contradicted. It never gets a second opinion. It never has a friend look at it and say, is that all it is? So it grows in exactly the conditions that grow things, and after nine years you are not carrying a sentence any more, you are carrying nine years of what a sentence becomes when nobody else has ever seen it.
Get it into the light and it goes back to being nine words.
And I am not going to ask you to start with a person. That is too big and I will not pretend it is not.
Start with a room. Empty. Car, garage, the beach at six in the morning, wherever you can be alone. Say the sentence out loud once, to nobody, in the air, where your own ears can hear it.
Something happens when a thing that has only ever been a thought becomes a sound. It gets a size. Nine years of a shape in the dark meets nine actual words in an actual room, and they are almost never the same size, and the difference is what you have been carrying.
You are safe to do this, right now, and it is not my promise; His word says perfect love casts out fear, and it is the Holy Spirit who is in the car with you when you say it, and He has known the sentence for nine years and has not once moved away from you.
Then, when you are ready, and it may not be this month, take it to one person at your own height. Not to fix your son. Not to get advice. Just so that one other human being on this earth has heard it.
That sentence comes out of your chest and into the light, and you are not betraying your boy by saying it. You are stopping a wall from having to be rebuilt.
You are already forgiven, already His, already held, and nine words have not changed one letter of it. His word says there is no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a settled fact at three in the morning rather than a doctrine you agree with in daylight.
Declare this over yourself
- Nine years of the dark, you are not a vault and you have grown this thing on me long enough. His word says confess your faults one to another and pray one for another that ye may be healed, so I bring it into the air in the name of Jesus.
- Fear that these nine words would end everything I have if a single person heard them, you have no ground here. Scripture says there is no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and His Spirit has known this sentence for nine years and has never once stepped back from me.
- God, this comes out of my chest and into the light tonight and I am not betraying my son by saying it. Your word says perfect love casts out fear, so I am speaking nine words in an empty car, at ordinary volume, with You in the passenger seat.
James 5:16
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