He can tell you where his strength came from. He has told a room full of young men, more than once, and he tells it well.
He was not born with it. That is the point of the way he tells it. He was a frightened boy and a soft young man and he was in a bad stretch at twenty four and God got hold of him, and what came out the other end was somebody who could stand up in a hard room and not move. He knows the day. He knows the passage. He has never once been in any doubt about the source, and when somebody says he is a strong man he says, without any performance in it, that he was not and that God did it.
That is one half of him and it is fully accounted for.
Here is the other half.
He is the one at the hospital. Every time, in that family, for twenty years. He is the one who knows how to sit with somebody without talking, and he is the one the nurses end up telling things to, and he is the one who noticed his niece was not all right in March when nobody else did, and he noticed from across a car park.
He does the thing with the little ones where he goes down on one knee so his face is at their level, and he has done it his whole adult life without ever thinking about it, and about eleven people in that family have picked the habit up off him.
And he has never once, in fifty one years, wondered where any of that came from.
It is not that he thinks it came from himself. He does not think about it at all. It is simply not filed anywhere. His strength has a testimony attached and a date and a passage, and his gentleness has nothing attached, and it sits in him unlabeled like a tool nobody has claimed.
Ask him what God has done in him and he will tell you about the hard room.
Ask him where the knee comes from and he will look at you as though you had asked where his hands came from.
You know that half. You may be strong or you may not, but you know what it is to credit God with one part of yourself and to have another part running unexamined and untraced, doing good in the world every week, belonging to nobody.
Both halves came from one place
Let me name the pit before we go to the text, because the verse will land wrong otherwise.
The pit is not pride. You are not taking credit for the gentleness; you would be genuinely surprised to be accused of it. The pit is that a whole half of what God has done in you is unaccounted for, and an unaccounted thing cannot be thanked for, cannot be leaned on, and cannot be recognized as His when you need to know He is like that. So on the night you need a God who goes down on one knee, you will reach for the God of the hard room, because that is the only one with a file.
Here is the verse, and it is the third paragraph of the Bible.
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.Genesis 1:27
One image. Two kinds of person needed to carry it.
Now the line, in the same breath, because on this ground we never teach the picture without it. God is neither male nor female. He is spirit, and Numbers 23:19 says flatly that God is not a man. Genesis 1:27 is not making God half masculine and half feminine, and it is not giving Him a soft side to balance a hard one. It is saying that the image of one undivided God, who is neither, took a man and a woman together to represent, and therefore everything good in either of them started in Him.
Take that on the sand, and know it is not my flattery, it is what the verse says. The half of you that goes down on one knee came out of God before it came out of you. Genesis 1:27 puts the whole image in Him, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a truth like that and files it in a man who has left it lying loose for fifty one years.
And Scripture goes further than inference. It puts the tenderness in God's own mouth.
As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.Isaiah 66:13
He chose that. Nobody handed it to Him. And the boundary stands where it stood: that is a simile God selected to say what He is like, it does not make God a mother, He is never addressed by that title, and the picture stays in the shape He gave it. What it does establish, permanently, is that the going down on one knee is not a private eccentricity of yours. It is a family resemblance.
You are carrying something that came from Him, and you were made in an image that holds it openly. Genesis 1:27 puts male and female inside one image from one Maker, and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a man trace back the half he has never traced.
You have been doing something of His in that family for twenty years and crediting it to nothing at all. I am not decorating; that is what one image means, and it is the Holy Spirit who works a recognition like that into a man who has never thought to ask the question.
Trace it back. That is the whole of tonight's work.
You are carrying tenderness that came from somewhere, and you were made in an image that holds it. Genesis 1:27 says male and female in one image from one Maker, and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a man trace back the half he has never once traced, which he could not do while he thought it came from nowhere.
Not develop it. Not improve it. You do not need to become gentler; you are the gentlest man in that family and everybody but you knows it. What is missing is a line drawn from the thing to its source, and a line like that takes about nine seconds to draw and changes what a man can reach for later.
So do it out loud.
Name one tender thing about yourself, plainly, without embarrassment, the way you would name your own hands. The knee. The car park in March. The way you sit with people without talking.
Then say: that came from God.
You are made in the image of a God who is neither male nor female, and both halves of you are His. That is Genesis 1:27 read exactly as written, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a man able to receive from a God he has finally recognized as being like that, which is the whole reason this matters.
Because here is what happens once the line is drawn, and it is not tonight and it may be years. There will come an hour when you do not need the God of the hard room. You will need the one who goes down on one knee so His face is at your level. And a man who has traced the gentleness back has somewhere to go on that night, and a man who never has will go on standing in a hard room being strong, alone, at the exact moment he did not have to be.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, standing or sitting. You are in Christ, and the authority to speak over your own life is delegated to you in Him; it does not depend on your being able to remember when the gentleness started, which you cannot. These stand on what is written in Genesis and in Isaiah, carried by the Holy Spirit and not by your recall. What He does with the recognition, and when, is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own timing.
- Gentleness in me that I never traced back, you did not come from nowhere, and I say so in the name of Jesus. Genesis 1:27 says male and female were both made in His image, so the half of me that goes down on one knee came out of God, and I am filing it where it belongs.
- Habit of crediting Him with the hard room and nothing else, you have no place in my life. It is written that He comforts as one whom his mother comforteth, and He said it about Himself, and His Spirit is the one who makes a man recognize a family resemblance in his own hands.
- Lord, You are neither male nor female, and the whole of both is in You. I read Genesis 1:27 out loud tonight and I trace one tender thing about myself back to You, and I am not making a joke at the end of the sentence.
Genesis 1:27
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.
