Ten to six on a Thursday, and the truck is coming down Coldwater Road with the window open and the radio off.
He is not thinking about it. That is the thing he would want you to understand. He is thinking about a delivery that did not come and about whether the dog has been let out, and underneath all of that, running quietly on its own, something in him has already started the countdown, and it started somewhere around the turn at the feed store, and it does not need his permission to run.
He comes in through the back. Coat on the hook. Kettle filled for his wife. All of it ordinary, all of it kind, all of it exactly the way a decent man comes home.
And then there is a small crossing in the evening, about the width of ten minutes, somewhere between the kettle and sitting down. And on the far side of that crossing the evening is already written.
Here is what he found out, over eleven years, and it is the only piece of self knowledge he has never been able to argue with.
He has never once decided the second one.
He decides the first one. He decides it properly, like a man, with reasons attached. It has been a week. It is Thursday. He has earned it. Everything after that is not decided by anybody at all. It simply happens, in order, the way water goes downhill, and at half past ten he is on the settee with the television talking to itself and the whole of Friday morning already spoken for.
He has tried the sensible things. He has moved it to a later hour, which worked for eleven days. He has counted. He has made rules on a Sunday that were gone by the Tuesday. He has said last time was the last time so often that he has stopped saying it out loud, because his wife's face when he says it is worse than the drinking.
And now I am going to stop describing him, because I think the ten minutes between the kettle and the chair is yours.
You already know the hour. You knew it before I finished the sentence. You could tell me what the light does in your kitchen at that hour.
Nobody is going to tell you that you did not want it enough
I need to say something before anything else, and I need you to hear it in the tone I mean it in.
You are not a weak man. You are not a weak woman. Whatever has been said to you or by you in the small hours about wanting it badly enough, it is not true and it is not the diagnosis and it has never once helped anybody. The Spirit who breathed John 8:36 is not in your kitchen tonight to take a view on your character. There is not one syllable in that verse about your willpower.
Look at your own evidence. You are somebody who keeps his word at work. You have done hard things for years without complaining. You have got up at four in the morning for people who never found out you did it. A person with no strength in them does not have a life that looks like yours.
So the shortage is not strength. It is that strength is the wrong tool entirely for this. This is a thing with a hold, and a hold is precisely what does not answer to effort, and every year you have spent trying to out muscle it has been a year of a good man carrying a weight nobody told him he was not required to lift. The Holy Spirit has had the other end of that weight the whole time, and nobody ever showed you the drawings.
We are not going to pile another rule on you tonight. There is no rule left that you have not already written and broken and grieved.
If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.John 8:36
Read the grammar of that. It is not you making yourself free. It is not you trying harder on Monday. Somebody else does the making, and what He makes is not an improvement or a stretch of good behavior, it is the real thing. Free indeed. Actually free. Free in the part of you that has been running the countdown since the feed store.
That is the whole gospel in one line, and it lands on this hour, in this kitchen, at ten to six.
And say it out loud with me once, plainly, because you have been carrying the opposite: the hold on your life was never a report on how much you love God, and it is not what He sees when He looks at you. The Spirit of God takes that sentence all the way back to the countdown that starts at the feed store. Free indeed is written over you tonight, and not over a better man than you.
So here is what is being handed to you, and it is not another system.
Freedom is not something you are going to manufacture between now and six o'clock. It is something Christ hands over, and He hands it over to people in exactly the state you are in tonight, at the hour you are dreading, without a probation period and without a speech from you first. Nothing in the written promise makes that handover wait for a better version of the man in the truck.
You do not have to promise Him anything. You have promised enough people enough things. Just be here, in the actual kitchen, with the actual hour coming, and let Him be here in it with you, which He already is. His Spirit came in with the coat and the kettle, and He did not come in to inspect you.
And receive this as part of the same gift, because it is: reach for a human being. Tell your doctor the truth about the amount, all of it, because changing how much you drink is a medical matter and doing that with a doctor beside you is wisdom and not weakness. Find the room where people meet and say the true sentence out loud. Telephone the one friend who has never once made a face.
None of that is a substitute for what God does. It is usually how He does it. He has been sending people into rooms with other people since the beginning, and the hand on your shoulder on a Tuesday night is not a lesser miracle than the one in the hospital room.
Declare this over yourself
Say them at ten to six, before the first one, while the whole evening is still yours. The Son has made you free, and in Christ that freedom is the standing you speak from rather than a result you are chasing. Speak to the mountain that is six inches tall and decides everything after it, and the outcome is His. None of this is you talking yourself into something. Long before this evening, John 8:36 was in writing. The Spirit carries it from the table into the hour.
- First drink of the evening, you do not decide my night. The Word of God says if the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed, and indeed is the strongest word in that sentence.
- Rest of this night, you belong to me and to the Lord, and I claim you in the name of Jesus. The Son has made me free, and free indeed reaches all the way into the hours after it.
- Jesus, You have made me free indeed, and indeed means actually. I stand in the freedom You bought, one evening at a time.
John 8:36
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
