Drawn Out of the Water at His Speed

The boat is upside down on the sand above the tide line with two paddles under it and a rope coiled on the keel, and it has been like that since Tuesday because nobody has needed it.

Evening. Small driftwood fire that has just got going properly. Three of them round it. Somebody has brought bread and somebody else has brought too much of everything else, which is the correct ratio.

Good cove. Sheltered. Ten minutes from the road.

There is another stretch of coast about four miles north and he has not been there in a long time. He does not talk about it, and he has organized his driving so that he does not go past the turnoff, and everybody who knows him well has noticed and nobody has ever asked.

He is fine. He wants that on the record. He is a well man with good people and a life he likes.

But lately something has been coming awake in him, and it brings with it a specific dread, which is that at some point somebody is going to tell him that real healing means going back there. Standing on it. Facing it. He has heard people talk like that and he has watched it done to a friend and he did not like what it cost.

Cousin, sit down by the fire. Because there is a psalm about being got out of deep water and I want you to notice who does every single thing in it.

He sent from above and took me

David writes a long psalm about being rescued and in the middle of it there is this.

He sent from above, he took me, he drew me out of many waters.Psalm 18:16

Three verbs. Count whose they are.

He sent from above. His. He took me. His. He drew me out. His.

The man in that verse contributes nothing. He is in deep water, which is what many waters means, and somebody reaches down from somewhere else and does all three things to him.

There is no clause about him swimming toward the hand. There is no clause about him going back into the water afterward to prove that he had properly dealt with it.

You are dealt with by Somebody who does all three verbs Himself, and the man in that verse never once swims toward anything. That is not a way of avoiding what is hard; Psalm 18:16 puts sending, taking and drawing all on His side, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a rescue psalm and lays it round a driftwood fire in a sheltered cove. Nothing in that account is asked of the person being drawn out.

Now the dread, and it is a real one and it is worth answering carefully.

You are afraid somebody will tell you that healing means going back and standing on that stretch of coast. You have watched that done and you have seen the price.

Here is what I will say, plainly. There are people who go back to a place and find it helps, and that is real, and it is theirs. There is nothing in Scripture that makes it a requirement.

You will not find a verse where somebody is returned to the site of the worst thing that happened to them as a condition of being made well. The lame man at the pool is not sent back for a swim. The woman with the issue of blood is not asked to describe twelve years. Peter is restored on a beach with a fire and a breakfast and three questions about love, not on the courtyard where he denied Him.

You are not required to return to a place in order to be made well, and nobody in the Gospels was ever sent back to the scene. John 21:15 has Peter restored over breakfast on a beach rather than in the courtyard, and it is the Holy Spirit who chooses the ground for these things and has never once chosen the worst available ground.

Speed is His and it always has been

One more thing, and it is the part I most want you to carry away from this fire.

The verb drew in that psalm is a verb with a pace built into it. Drawing something out of water is not the same as hauling it. It implies steadiness and control by whoever is doing the drawing.

So the timing is not yours to force and it is not anybody else's to set for you. Not a friend's, not a book's, not a well meaning person at church who has a strong view about facing things.

And it is not mine either. I am not going to tell you what you should do about a stretch of coast. I do not know, and the person who does know is the One with the three verbs.

You are being drawn at a pace that belongs to Him, and no other person has ever been handed the timing of it. Ecclesiastes 3:1 says to every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that timing in His hands rather than delegating it to whoever is most confident about it.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it works round a fire.

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 how much of your own history you are willing to walk back into. 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.