Forty Years of the Right Words

He can do it in his sleep and he suspects that on at least two occasions he has.

Somebody in the church rings Gordon when there is trouble, and he goes, and he sits down, and he says the right things, and they are true things and he means them and they help. He has been doing that since 1984.

He is seventy. He has buried a great many people and prayed with more.

And in the autumn there was a Tuesday where a young man in the church, whose father had died in the summer, said something to him that Gordon has not been able to shake.

They were in the workshop. The lad had come to borrow something and had stayed for two hours, which is what people do in that workshop, and at some point he said, how do you know, though? Not what it says. How do you know?

And Gordon said the right thing. Of course he did. Forty years of saying the right thing does not switch off because a young man asks a good question.

And the lad accepted it, because it was a good answer and it was true.

But when the boy had gone, Gordon stood in the doorway with the sun coming in low across the sawdust and thought: when did I last actually look?

Not say. Look.

And the honest answer is that he does not know. He is fairly sure there was a stretch in his forties where he went down and checked properly, probably around the time his wife was ill. Since then, thirty years of being the one who is rung, thirty years of arriving and saying the right things, and no memory whatsoever of ever going down to look at the thing itself.

He is not in trouble. He wants to be clear about that to himself and he has been over it several times since.

He believes it. He is not going through motions and he has never once said a thing he did not hold.

It is that a man can spend forty years handing water to other people and never once put his own cup in the well, and it does not show, and nothing goes wrong, and the water is real the whole time.

And you may know that doorway. You may be the one people ring, and you may be very good at it, and you may not remember the last time you went down and checked what it is standing on.

The one thing he was told to keep watch over is not the words

Let me take something off you before anything else, because you have been carrying it since that Tuesday and it is not yours.

You are not a hollow man. You never were. Scripture tells a man to keep watch over one particular thing and it is not his speech, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the accuracy of forty years of good sentences, who keeps a heart alive. Set it down here on the bench. It is heavy, and it has been out in that doorway with you since the autumn.

Now hear the instruction, and hear which item it names.

Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.Proverbs 4:23

Above all else.

Not above all else guard your doctrine, though a man should be careful there. Not guard your reputation, or your usefulness, or your record of being right. The heart, which is the well itself, and the reason given is that everything comes out of it.

Which means the thing you have not checked in thirty years is the exact item Scripture puts at the top of the list, and His Spirit is the one who has kept it for you.

And it is not a scolding. It is an instruction with the word guard in it, which is a job a man can do, and it is given to ordinary people who are busy.

You are able to go down and look. Right now, at seventy, this morning, in that workshop. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who has kept that well from going dry through three decades of you handing water out of it, and He has never once been holding out for a better man.

Now let me be careful, because there is a ditch here.

Nothing in this says your forty years were performance. They were not. You have been rung because you are the man who goes, and what you have said in those rooms was true and Scripture does not sneer at a man who has learned to say true things well, and His Spirit has used every one of them.

And nothing here says the vocabulary is the problem. The phrases you use are load bearing and they have held people up at gravesides. Keep every one of them.

The point is only that saying and looking are two different actions, and one of them can go on for thirty years without the other and nobody can tell from outside, including you.

Here is the plain part. You do not need a crisis to go down and look.

Men your age often assume that is how it works: that God will arrange something and you will find out what is down there. That has happened to people, and it is a hard way to find out, and it is not required. A man can go down on an ordinary Tuesday with the sun on the sawdust and put his own cup in.

Scripture puts the guarding of the heart above everything else and His Spirit is the one who has kept yours, and neither of them ever asked you to wait for trouble.