Able to Keep You

She has already worked out roughly when she will lose it, and the answer is Saturday.

Not consciously. She has not sat down with a calendar. But there is a shape she knows from experience: something real happens, and it holds through the working week because the week has structure in it, and then the weekend arrives with its long unstructured afternoons and somewhere around Saturday evening it goes.

She has watched that happen enough times to have stopped being surprised by it.

So this morning, which is a Wednesday, she is not enjoying what she has. She is managing it. She is holding a thing she has already scheduled the loss of, and the holding has a particular tiredness in it that anybody who has done this will recognize: the tiredness of looking after something you are certain you are about to drop.

I want to say clearly that she is not being faithless. She is being empirical. This is not a woman making up a fear. It is a woman with data, drawing a reasonable inference from it, which is a completely different thing and deserves a completely different answer.

But the inference has one enormous assumption in it, and she has never examined the assumption, because nobody put it into words for her.

The assumption is that the keeping of this is her job.

That is you on a Wednesday.

You have a date in mind. And you are not enjoying today, because today is the part before the date, and the whole of your energy is going into a holding operation you have already concluded will fail.

Jude puts the keeping in God's ability

Right at the end of a short and fairly severe letter, Jude turns and says this, and the first word after him is the one you need.

Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy.Jude 24

Him that is able to keep you from falling.

Read what the sentence makes God responsible for. Not the encouragement. Not the resources. The keeping. And read what it says about Him in relation to it: able.

That is a word about capacity, and Jude uses it in a letter otherwise concerned with people who did fall, which is not an accident. He has just spent a whole letter on failure, and then he turns and addresses a God whose capacity is the last word on the subject.

You are held by Someone whose ability is the thing named, and the keeping is His job in that sentence rather than yours, and I am not lifting a doxology out of its context: Jude 24 says able to keep you from falling, in writing, at the end of a letter about falling, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying so who can get it to a woman managing a Wednesday.

Now let me teach the second half, because it is where the joy is and almost nobody reads it. To present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy.

There is a presenting in that sentence, and God does the presenting, and He does it with exceeding joy. That is not a grim maintenance operation. It is somebody bringing you forward gladly, and the gladness is described as excessive.

You are being kept toward a moment somebody is looking forward to, rather than propped up out of duty, which is written into the exceeding joy rather than into my enthusiasm, with the Spirit of God able to reach a woman whose experience has taught her something reasonable and incomplete.

Here is what I would say about your data, because I will not pretend it does not exist. You are right about the pattern. What you have never had is a second variable. All your evidence is about what happens when the keeping is yours, and there is no entry anywhere in your records for what happens when it is His, because nobody ever told you that was on offer.

This is His to keep and the diary entry you made was never confirmed by anybody, because Scripture names Him as able, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a Wednesday with a Saturday in it.