Revealed Is A Word With A Date On It

Long tables down the middle of a bright hall, coats coming off, three people trying to work out where the extra chairs went last time.

That particular noise of a room filling up.

She is forty-three.

It has been three years and it is the kind of thing that does not have an end date, and everybody has been magnificent, and she means that, and it is also true that she has begun to dread this hall.

Not the people. The instruction.

Because at some point in every gathering, somebody will say it. Rejoice in the Lord always. Count it all joy. This is the day the Lord has made. And it is always said by somebody warm, usually to the room rather than to her, and every time it lands on her as a task she is failing.

She cannot rejoice. She has tried, and she is not a shallow woman, and she knows the difference between happiness and joy and could give you a decent talk on it. She simply cannot produce the thing that is being asked for, and after three years of not being able to produce it, she has arrived at a conclusion about herself that she keeps in a drawer and does not open in public.

If somebody says rejoice at you weekly, you know they are quoting the Bible, and you know exactly what it costs you to nod.

Peter puts the gladness at a moment

Weigh it first and at its own size, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it never gets shortened.

What this costs is not the three years, or not only. It is the addition of a task to them. It costs you the hall, which used to be a good place and is now a place where a thing is required of you weekly. It costs the nod, which you perform. It costs you the ability to be in a room while a true verse is quoted, which is a strange thing to lose in a church. And it costs you a conclusion in a drawer, which you have never said out loud and which is about your own spiritual state rather than about your body.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your three years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before we go on: if the conclusion in the drawer has moved somewhere darker, as far as thinking this room would be lighter without you at the end of a table, tell one living person today. Your doctor, one of the three looking for the chairs, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks nobody to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who take your coat and find you a seat.

Now, Peter, who is writing to people in serious trouble, and read where he puts the gladness.

But rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ's sufferings; that, when his glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy.1 Peter 4:13

Read the second half of that verse, because it is the half that gets left off.

That, when his glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy.

Peter has a phrase for the enormous gladness, and it is not applied to now. Exceeding joy is located, explicitly, at the revealing. He puts the great overwhelming version at a moment, and the moment is when the glory appears, and it has not appeared yet.

You are being told where the exceeding joy sits, and it does not sit on this Thursday. First Peter 4:13 puts the gladness at the revealing rather than at the present hour, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a letter written to people under pressure and lays it on a hall filling up with coats.

Now, the first word, because it is still there and I am not going to pretend it is not. Rejoice. Peter does say it. But look at what he attaches it to: inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ's sufferings. He is not asking anybody to feel a particular way about their circumstances. He is naming what they are in and calling that a participation, and the rejoicing he asks for is aimed at that participation rather than at the trouble itself.

You have never been asked in that verse to produce a feeling about your own affliction. That is written into 1 Peter 4:13, and His Spirit in you is the one who makes a distinction like that land in a room where a verse gets quoted weekly.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because three years of good sentences have already been said in that hall.

It does not tell you when the revealing is, and it does not predict anything about your body or your circumstances, and I am not going to, because what God does there is His, in His own way.

And it does not tell you the man who says rejoice at the room is wrong to say it. He is quoting Scripture and he is warm and he is talking to two hundred people, and this site is not going to prosecute a man for quoting Peter in a hall.

What it does is put the enormous version of the gladness where Peter puts it, which is at a moment that has not arrived, so that a woman who cannot produce it now is not failing at something the verse asked of her.

You were never told by Peter that the exceeding joy is due this week. Scripture locates it at the revealing, and the same Spirit who inspired the letter is the one who carries the whole verse into a bright hall.