The Best Lie I Ever Told Lasted About Four Minutes

I broke the blue jug.

It was the good one, the one that only comes out when people come over, and I broke it doing something I had already been told twice not to do. And in the two seconds after it hit the floor I had a genuinely excellent idea, which was that Bucky had been in the kitchen earlier and everybody knows what Bucky is like.

So that is what I said. I said Bucky must have got in.

And here is the thing about that. It worked. My dad looked at the pieces and he looked at the door and he said hm, and he went and checked the latch, and I stood there in the kitchen having successfully gotten away with it.

It was the worst four minutes of my whole life.

I have been hit by a gate. I have been stood on by a cow. Nothing has ever felt like standing in that kitchen watching my dad go outside to look at a latch that was fine, because of a thing I said, about a goat who does not talk and therefore cannot say it was not him.

I went out after him and I told him. He did not even look surprised.

Why it feels like carrying something

David wrote about this and he did not write it as a rule. He wrote it as a description of how his own body felt.

When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long. For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me: my moisture is turned into the drought of summer. (Psalm 32:3, 4)

Bones. Roaring. Heavy. He is not describing punishment arriving from outside. He is describing what it is like inside a person who is holding something in.

And then the next verse, which is the whole turn:

I acknowledged my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the LORD; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin. (Psalm 32:5)

Notice the order and how fast it goes. He says he will confess. And in the same sentence, before there is any account of him doing anything else, it says God forgave.

You are not carrying the weight of God being angry. You are carrying what a person carries when the truth is still inside them, and He is not the one who put it there. Psalm 32:3 describes it in a body rather than in a verdict, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that distinction land in a child.

You have not been left to work out the difference on your own. Psalm 32:5 puts the forgiving inside the same sentence as the deciding, and His Spirit is what makes that speed believable to somebody who has been standing in a kitchen.

Why anything at all can be said to Him

There is a sentence in Hebrews that would be terrifying if the rest of the paragraph were not there.

Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do. (Hebrews 4:13)

He already knows. Everything. That is the part a child works out early and finds uncomfortable.

But read the very next sentences, because they are the reason this is good news rather than bad:

Seeing then that we have a great high priest, let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need. (Hebrews 4:14, 16)

Boldly. Because He already knows, there is nothing left to manage. Nobody is informing Him. It is agreeing with Him about something He has been looking at the whole time, and He is not shocked, and He is not deciding what to think about anybody based on how well they word it.

You are not bringing God new information, and Hebrews 4:13 says so before it says come boldly. The Spirit of God is what turns being fully known into the reason to speak rather than the reason to stay quiet.

You have been invited to come boldly rather than carefully. Hebrews 4:16 uses that adverb on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an adverb like that change how somebody walks into a room.

The one who did not say it, and the one who did

There are two men in the Gospels who both failed badly in the same week.

One of them denied he even knew Jesus, three times, with people watching, and then went outside and wept bitterly. The other betrayed Him for money.

What separated them afterward was not the size of what they did. It was what they did with it. Peter went back to the people who knew, and Jesus asked him three times whether he loved Him, once for each denial, and gave him work to do.

He saith unto him the third time, Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me? Peter was grieved because he said unto him the third time, Lovest thou me? And he said unto him, Lord, thou knowest all things; thou knowest that I love thee. Jesus saith unto him, Feed my sheep. (John 21:17)

Scripture does not tell that as a warning about how bad betrayal is. It tells it as two roads out of the same room.

You have been handed work rather than a record. John 21:17 ends the whole conversation on feed my sheep instead of on an apology being accepted, and His Spirit is what makes an assignment feel like being trusted again.