Everyone In The Room Knew That Word

There is a list and you have never written it down.

Words. Nine or ten of them by now. Each one arrived in a conversation, went past without stopping, and left you nodding.

You know which meeting each one came from. That is the strange part. You could tell me where you were sitting when you first heard four of them.

And every one of them went into the same place in your mind, which is the place where things go that everybody else appears to have been given.

That is the picture you have built. That somewhere, at some point, there was a room, and in that room these words were handed out, and you were not in it.

I want to look at that room, because I do not think it exists, and because the belief that it does has been costing you for years.

Here is what I think actually happened, and it is far more ordinary and far less personal.

Nobody was ever issued anything. Every one of those words arrived in somebody's ear the same way it arrived in yours, in a conversation, unexplained, and most of the people in that meeting learned it by hearing it enough times to guess.

They are not remembering a lesson. They are guessing with more practice.

Words easy to be understood

There is a passage about speaking in a way people can follow, and the burden it places is not on the listener.

So likewise ye, except ye utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, how shall it be known what is spoken? for ye shall speak into the air. (1 Corinthians 14:9, King James Version)

Words easy to be understood. That is the requirement, and it is placed on the speaker.

The passage is not about listeners who should try harder. It is about speakers, and it says that a speaker who is not understood has spoken into the air.

You are owed words that can be understood, and no listener anywhere has ever once carried the duty that Scripture puts on the speaker. 1 Corinthians 14:9 says except ye utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a weight back onto the shoulder it belongs on.

Notice how strong the last phrase is. Ye shall speak into the air.

Not, you will be partly understood. Not, some will follow. Into the air, which means nothing happened at all, and the failure is entirely at the speaking end.

You have never once been the one who failed in that transaction, and no unclear sentence has ever been the fault of the person who did not follow it. The Holy Spirit is the one who assigns a failure accurately, and it is written that the speaking went into the air rather than into a listener who was inadequate.

And notice what the whole chapter is arguing for. It is arguing that a room full of people who do not understand what is being said is a room that is not working.

Not a room full of inadequate people. A room that is not working.

You were sitting in a room that was not working, and no meeting has ever once been made better by everybody nodding at a word. The Spirit of God is the one who judges the room rather than the person in it, and Scripture spends a whole chapter on exactly that argument.

The room that was never held

Now let me be concrete, because a general reassurance will not empty a list of nine words.

Think about how you would find out where that room was. Ask yourself when it would have been held. What year. What building. Who ran it.

There is no answer, because there was no room. There is only a very large number of separate conversations, spread over years, in which words got used and nobody explained them.

And every person in your meeting has their own list of nine words, and each of them believes the same thing about the same imaginary room.

You are one of a great many people holding an identical private list, and no room like that has ever once been held anywhere by anybody. The Spirit of God is the one who dissolves a picture built out of a silence, and 1 Corinthians 14:9 puts the fault on the unclear speaking rather than on the listener.

And here is the second half, which is arithmetic. Nine words over eleven years is one word every fifteen months.

That is not a man falling behind. That is the ordinary rate at which new words arrive in any field, and every single person in that room is running the same rate and has the same backlog.

That is a gap in the teaching and it is not a gap in you. Nobody ever explains these, because the people using them forgot they ever had to learn them.

You have been running the same rate as everybody in that room, and one new word every fifteen months has never once been a man falling behind anything. The written word puts the duty on the one who speaks, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does an arithmetic a man has never once done for himself.

Say one, then ask one

Now the small thing, and it is two pieces.

I am not going to suggest you go and study anything. There is nothing to study, because those nine words are not a subject, they are nine unconnected things that arrived on nine separate afternoons.

Say out loud one word you have never asked about, and then ask one person what it means.

You are able to say a word out loud and then ask about it, and one question about one word has never once been an announcement about a man. 1 Corinthians 14:9 puts the burden on clear speaking, and the Holy Spirit is the one present when a man asks about something he has carried for years.

Say it out loud first, on your own. That part matters more than it sounds.

A word that has only ever lived in your head as a shameful blank changes when it is said in your own voice at a normal volume. It becomes a word rather than a symptom.

Then ask somebody. Not the whole list. One word, to one person, in an ordinary voice, the way you would ask what a road is called.

You are turning a shameful blank into an ordinary word, and one word said out loud has never once cost a man anything at all. The Spirit of God is the one who changes what a thing is by having it spoken, and it is written that a room where nobody understands is a room that is not working.