A Bruised Reed and Nobody Is Snapping It

Somebody has carried the kettle out into the garden on an extension lead, which is not sensible and is exactly the sort of thing this lot do, and there are four mismatched chairs and a crate that somebody is sitting on.

Late afternoon. Warm. Two of his oldest friends and one of their sisters. Somebody has brought the good biscuits.

And one of them says, in the way you do, how are you, mate.

And fine is out of his mouth before he has consulted himself about it.

That is the thing he has started noticing. Not that he lies. He does not think of it as lying, because he has no other answer available and could not produce one under any pressure at all. The word arrives first. It is faster than he is.

He has answered fine for a long time. Long enough that if somebody sat him down and genuinely wanted the real answer, he is not sure there is one loaded. He would have to go and look, and he does not know where.

And what he is afraid of, quietly, is precisely that: that coming round means somebody is going to ask again, properly, with time, and he will have nothing to give them, and that will be worse than the fine.

Sit on the crate with me, friend. Because there is a line in Isaiah about how the Servant of God handles people who are barely holding, and I want you to have it.

He is described by what He does not break

Isaiah is describing the Servant, the One who is coming, and of all the things he could say about His power, he picks this.

A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth.Isaiah 42:3

Two images and they are both about things that are nearly finished.

A bruised reed is a reed that is bent. It is not much use for anything. It would be perfectly reasonable to snap it off and throw it away.

Smoking flax is a wick that has gone out and is producing smoke and no light. Any sensible person pinches it and relights it or replaces it.

And the Servant, in the sentence that is meant to introduce Him to us, does neither.

That is not a small thing. He could have been introduced by His power, by what He would break and overturn. Isaiah introduces Him by what He handles gently.

You are the sort of thing He is specifically described as handling without breaking, and that description was chosen as His introduction. That is not a soft reading of a prophecy; Isaiah 42:3 picks a bent reed and a smoking wick as the two illustrations, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a servant song and lays it in a back garden with a kettle on an extension lead. You are not being assessed for usefulness. That is not what is happening.

Now the second half, and it is the fear, which is more specific than you have let yourself say.

You are afraid of being asked properly and having nothing loaded. That is the real one. Not that somebody will find something bad. That somebody will find nothing at all, and you will be exposed as a man with no interior to report.

Let me tell you what I think about that. A man who has answered fine for years does not have nothing inside him. He has something inside him that has not been asked for in so long that it has stopped keeping itself ready. Those are entirely different conditions, and the second one is repairable and is not shameful.

You have an inside that has gone unasked rather than an inside that has gone empty, and He has never confused the two. Psalm 139:1 says O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that knowledge a comfort in a man rather than an exposure, because Somebody has already looked and has not gone away.

Nobody is demanding a real answer today

Let me be practical, because I do not want you sitting on a crate braced for a question.

The waking that is available to you today does not require you to produce an inventory. God is not conducting an interview and neither am I. There is no version of this where you have to have a good answer ready by the weekend.

What is being asked is much smaller. It is that one thing you have been keeping at arm's length gets named, out loud, to God, and only to Him, and only that it exists.

You do not have to open it. You do not have to feel anything about it. You are explicitly allowed to leave it exactly where it is for today.

You have permission to name something and leave it, and the permission is His rather than mine to give or withhold. Psalm 62:8 says pour out your heart before Him, and pouring out is not the same as explaining, and it is the Holy Spirit who receives an unexplained thing and does not send it back for more detail.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it does more than say fine.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed there is. Not the quality of what you can currently report about yourself. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.