The Sentence You’ve Never Said Out Loud

There’s a sentence you’ve never said to anybody.

You’ve thought it in a truck. At two in the morning, in a hospital parking lot, at a funeral where everybody around you knew the words and you moved your mouth.

I don’t think I get to have this anymore.

Not that it isn’t true. You’ve never really gotten all the way to that. It’s something quieter and more permanent than doubt.

It’s that whatever this is, whatever it was you had at nineteen or thirty-one or the year your first one was born, that door closed while you were busy, and it closed from the inside, and you are not the sort of person who gets to knock on it now.

You’ve never said that out loud because there’s nobody to say it to. The people who’d understand it aren’t around anymore. The people who are around would try to fix it in about eight seconds, and you can’t stand being fixed.

So you’ve carried it. For a long time. And you’ve built a decent life on top of it and mostly you don’t think about it, except at two in the morning, and at funerals.

That sentence is what this book is about. I’m not going to argue with it in this introduction. I’m going to tell you who’s talking and why you should keep going, and then we’ll get to work.

I served on church staffs for twenty-five years.

I started preaching in country churches when I was fourteen years old, at revivals that ran seven nights straight. Then a Christian college, a seminary degree with the biblical languages, and then youth pastor, recreation pastor, family pastor, education pastor, executive pastor. I put a counseling center inside a church and ran it. I have a PhD in counseling psychology.

I didn’t pick any of that. My great-grandfather was a preacher. There were pastors and church men on both sides, my dad’s and my mom’s, going back further than anybody bothered to write down. By the time I was old enough to have an opinion about it I was already standing in it.

The church I came up in was independent Baptist and hard conservative. King James only. Inspired from cover to cover, and the joke we made about it later was that you could tell because most Bibles have genuine leather stamped inside the back cover. No textual criticism, no literary criticism, no asking what a passage meant in the world it was written in. God said it, I believe it, that settles it.

And education would ruin you. The line I heard more than once was that college would make your mind so open your brain would fall out.

I had questions from the time I was a boy. Not doubts. Questions.

So I went off and got thirty hours of Greek and thirty hours of Hebrew.

My theology stayed conservative. My methodology never did. That’s most of what you need to know about how this book is going to read.

I left in 2006 and I have not been back inside on a Sunday in twenty years.

Nobody pushed me out. There was no scandal, no meeting, no letter. I took a job with a friend and I went, and I closed that door myself, from the inside.

I turn sixty this year.

That’s the whole résumé and I’m giving it to you at the front so you can decide right now whether to keep reading. Everything on it except the leaving is just evidence that I knew the words.

Now let me tell you what this book is not, because you’ve been handed things before.

I am not trying to get my job back. This is not a fallen minister writing his way back into a pulpit. I’m not asking anybody for anything, there is nothing at the end of this you have to buy, and I have no position I’m hoping you’ll help me recover. I have three companies and a life. I’m fine.

This is not a book about what’s wrong with the church. I’m not going to spend two hundred pages settling accounts. There are things I could say and I’ve decided not to say them, not because they’d be untrue but because a book that’s busy prosecuting somebody has no room left to be useful to you. Nobody in here gets indicted. If anybody does, it’ll be me.

And I am not going to work you toward a building. I want to be clear about that now, so you can relax and read. There is no chapter at the end where I ask you to find a church. I’m not in one. It would be a strange thing for me to ask.

What I am is a man who spent a quarter century inside all of it, watched several hundred people go through exactly what you’re going through, walked out, made a mess of some things personally, and has been sitting with all of it for twenty years.

I’m not further along than you. I’m further in.

So here’s the book.

There’s a story you already know. A young man takes his share of his father’s money, goes off to a distant country, spends all of it, ends up feeding pigs, and comes home. You’ve heard it a hundred times. Somebody probably preached it at you before you could read.

Here’s what nobody told you about it.

It ends at the party.

The music comes up, the calf goes on the fire, the boy is home, and the story stops. Luke never tells you what Tuesday looked like in that house. And Tuesday is the actual problem, because on Tuesday that young man still has a ruined reputation in that town, a brother who won’t speak to him, no money, no skills, no standing, and every person at that feast can tell you exactly what he did.

The parable gets a man home. It does not tell him what to do with the rest of his life.

So for that, we need twelve other men.

Jesus put together a group and there was not one qualified person in it. A man who denied him out loud, three times, in front of witnesses. A man who collected taxes from his own neighbors for the people who ran the country. Two brothers who asked permission to burn a village. One who wouldn’t believe it without physical evidence. Three the record can’t tell you one thing about, and one of those three the church could never even get the name straight on. And one it never took in at all.

They are the only honest picture in the Bible of what a disqualified person actually does on Monday morning.

That’s this book. A parable that ends too early, and twelve men who are the rest of the answer.

There’s one more thing and it’s the hinge everything turns on, so I’ll put it here at the front.

On the road home, that young man writes a speech.

He decides what he’s worth now. He plans to say I’m no longer worthy to be called your son, make me one of the hired hands. He is coming back, but coming back small, and he wants that settled before he gets to the door.

He gets partway through it. The father’s entire answer is to call for a robe.

You’ve written the same speech.

You could recite it right now. I’ll come back but I’m not getting involved in anything. I’ll sit in the back. I don’t have anything to offer at this point in my life. I just want to be all right, that’s all.

Every one of those sentences is a negotiated demotion and every one of them sounds like humility.

The whole point of this book is that the Father does not take that deal, and that twelve badly qualified men are the receipts.

Two practical things before you start.

Every chapter ends with one small thing to do. They are small on purpose. Write a sentence. Say a thing out loud in your truck. Make one phone call. None of them takes longer than twenty minutes and none of them requires you to tell a soul.

Do them. A book you agree with changes nothing. I’ve watched men nod their way through better material than this for twenty-five years and go home exactly the same.

And here’s the only definition I’ll offer, because you’re going to want to know what I mean when I say a word like home.

Coming home is opening up a place in your heart to God and godly things.

That’s it. That’s all it is. No building, no membership, no Sunday, nothing to sign, nobody to tell. You can do it tonight, alone, in a parked truck, and no one will ever know but you.

That sentence you’ve never said out loud is not the disqualification you’ve been treating it as.

It’s the beginning of an honest conversation you’ve been having by yourself for years.

Let’s have the rest of it.