Four In The Afternoon

He is already halfway through the sentence before he hears it.

That is the thing about it. There is no decision anywhere in the process. Somebody at the far end of the office asks him a perfectly reasonable question at four in the afternoon, and out of his mouth comes a voice he has not chosen: flat, clipped, faintly contemptuous, the exact tone his father used, the tone he swore at nineteen would never be his. And it is his, and it has just crossed the room in front of six people.

He apologizes. He always apologizes, and he means it, and the apology is accepted with a small laugh, and everyone goes back to what they were doing.

He sits there afterwards with his hands on the desk.

Because the apology is not the problem. The problem is the arithmetic that starts running the second the words are out, and it runs every single time, and it goes like this: eleven years. Eleven years since the night he gave his life to Christ. Eleven years of Sundays and Bibles and prayers meant honestly, and here he still is, at four in the afternoon, sounding exactly like the man he was at twenty three.

And the conclusion he draws is always the same one, and it is a lie so quiet that he has never once caught it in the act. The conclusion is: nothing actually happened. Whatever I thought took place eleven years ago, look at the evidence. The old one is still here. He did not stay down. He gets up every day at four in the afternoon, and he uses my mouth.

The strange thing about him is that at eleven in the morning he does not think this. At eleven in the morning he is a Christian with a settled heart. It is only at four, and it is always at four, and by seven he has usually recovered enough to be embarrassed about the whole thing.

Now let me stop calling him he.

Because you know the hour. Yours might be six in the evening when the house gets loud. It might be the twenty minutes after you close the front door. It might be Sunday night. You have an hour when the old one shows up and speaks in your voice, and you have been treating that hour as the courtroom where the truth about you finally comes out.

Sit down somewhere. The court is not in session.

Which one of them is you

I am not going to ask you to try harder at four o'clock. Let me put that down at the start, because you are braced for it, and the bracing costs you more than the request would.

There is no technique here. Nobody is going to hand you a breathing exercise for the afternoon, or a verse to tape to a monitor, or a plan for the next thirty days. And nobody here is going to tell you that the old voice comes back because something was left undone eleven years ago. That is not what is happening, and I want to say so plainly and early, because it is the accusation you have been quietly agreeing with.

Here is what is actually true, and it is the whole message.

You have been letting the worst twenty seconds of your day cast the deciding vote on who you are. Eleven in the morning does not get a vote. Tuesday at nine does not get a vote. Only four in the afternoon gets a vote, because four in the afternoon is the moment you consider evidence.

And that is not how the accounting works. Not because the twenty seconds do not matter, but because you were never the sum of your best or worst moments in the first place. Somebody else set your identity, and He set it somewhere other than in your behavior on a Tuesday.

We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.Romans 6, verse 4

I am not going to take that sentence apart. It does not need me to. Read it once more slowly and just notice the pronouns: we were buried, He was raised, we walk. Every single verb in it is something done with Him and not something achieved by you.

You are somebody who was buried with Him and raised to walk in newness of life, and that is a standing rather than a mood. Scripture states it as a completed act, and the Holy Spirit in you is the one who makes a finished thing operational on an ordinary Tuesday.

That is your standing. Not a feeling you had eleven years ago, and not the average of your afternoons since. The old one went down in Christ's death and Christ came up in the Father's glory, and you came up in Him, and the reason the old voice can still make a sound is not that he survived. It is that a habit is a groove worn in a person over decades, and a groove takes a long time to fill in.

A returning pattern is not a resurrection. It is an echo. Echoes are loud, and they are convincing, and they are made of nothing.

You are new, and the returning pattern is a road worn into a hillside rather than a resident of the house. The written word puts the newness in what God did, and the Holy Spirit has been in you through every four o'clock since.

So the question that has been running underneath your afternoons, which one of these two is the real me, has an answer, and the answer is not the louder one. The real you is the one God named. The one at four in the afternoon is the one you keep apologizing for, which is itself a sign of whose you are, because the old one never apologized in his life.

You are the one who came up, and the twenty seconds at four in the afternoon never got a vote on that. Scripture settles it and the Holy Spirit is the seal, and no hour of any day has ever been the measurement.