A daily word from someone who has been reading.

There Is No Gap In God

The anchor verse is Revelation 4:11.

The Daily Word is the doorway.
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You know the distance between meaning to do something and doing it.

You meant to make the call. Three months went by. You decided to forgive someone, and you meant it when you decided, and then your chest did not follow. You wanted to be a different kind of parent, a different kind of friend, a different kind of person, and you can name the exact day you decided. The deciding was real. The space between the deciding and the doing was also real.

That space lives in every one of us. We think one thing and become another. We want, and then we wait. We choose something and need a second push before anything moves.

Here is what we do with that. We assume GOD is built the same way.

Almost two thousand years ago, a group of teachers put together an enormous system to explain how the world came to be. They said the highest being had two companions. One was his thought. One was his will. They were separate powers. He conceived the idea of producing something, and the thought brooded over it, and nothing came of it. The thought could not bring anything forth on her own. She had to wait until the will came upon her. Only then did anything appear.

They had described a god with a gap in him.

A man read all of it and wrote it down so the church would recognize it when it came knocking. Irenaeus of Lyons, a second-century teacher who defended the faith against those who dressed up error to look like truth. He copied their teaching out in detail, and he did it to expose it, never to recommend it.

And he made one comparison that is worth carrying with you.

Irenaeus said these teachers had handed us Homer's Jove. In the old poem, the king of the gods lies awake all night working out a plan. The thing turns over and over in the dark. Morning arrives before the answer does.

That is a god who has to think about it.

Then Irenaeus set the real GOD beside that picture, and what he wrote is one of the plainest sentences in the early church. As soon as HE thinks, HE performs what HE has willed. As soon as HE wills, HE thinks what HE has willed. HE is all thought, all will, all mind, all light, all eye, all ear, the one entire fountain of all good things.

There is no gap in GOD.

No sleepless night. No brooding. No waiting for a second power to arrive so HE can finally produce what HE wanted. Nothing gets caught between what HE intends and what HE does. HE is not deciding. HE has never been deciding.

Long before anyone assembled that system, John was shown a throne, and the voices around it said something that answers the whole thing in one line.

Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.

The word behind pleasure there is will. By HIS will they were made, and by HIS will they hold together. Will and being, in the same breath, with nothing in between.

Now bring that home, because this is not a lesson about an old argument.

You have wondered whether GOD is still making up HIS mind about you.

You prayed and heard nothing back, and in the middle of that silence you started building a picture. In the picture HE is considering. HE is weighing whether you are worth the trouble. Your name sits on a list somewhere and HE has not gotten to it, and maybe HE will, and maybe something you did moved you down the page.

That picture is Homer's Jove. It is not GOD.

I cannot tell you what the silence was. I can tell you what it was not. It was not GOD upstairs, turning your name over, working out whether to bother.

And here is the part that goes deepest. When we needed GOD, HE did not send word down a chain of lesser messengers until something finally reached the ground. Those teachers needed thirty layers to get from their god to the world.

GOD came HIMSELF.

That is the whole difference. Not a system. A Person, arriving, in a body, on the ground, with dirt on HIS feet, close enough to touch and be touched.

You have a gap. You know it better than anyone. The space between the person you meant to be and the person you have been is the ground you know best.

GOD does not have one. And HE did not wait at the edge of yours for you to close it first.

I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.

🙏 To the one who prayed and heard nothing back, and started to believe GOD is still deciding about you.

🙏 To the one who cannot close the space between what you meant to do and what you did.

🙏 To the one who was taught that GOD stays near only when you love HIM well enough.

🙏 To the one who has been searching your own depths for GOD and finding only yourself.

Grace and Peace.

The Neighbor Who Showed Up

Yesterday morning’s word was The Neighbor Who Showed Up.

The anchor verses were Galatians 6:2 and Galatians 6:9.

Two neighbors who disagree about almost everything, and a ruined floor. When the water leak hit, the neighbor still crossed the yard and helped rebuild it. The love did not wait for the arguments to be settled. It was waiting on an opportunity.

As you have opportunity, do good to all people. Start with the one next door.

The full word from Saturday, July 11 is in the archive.