Very Near, In Your Mouth, In Your Heart

The board is the one with the split in it that his wife says they should replace and neither of them will. The loaf sits on it every week and every week the split gets a little more crumb in it.

Friday, going dark outside. Two of the children home, one on a screen with the sound off because she was asked. The lamp on. Everything in the room warm and ordinary and good.

He says the words. He has said these words over this bread more times than he could count, and his father said them, and they are true and beautiful and he means them.

And they come out of him like a recording. Not badly. Word perfect, warm even. But from the same place a recording comes from, which is somewhere that is not exactly a person.

He tears the loaf and hands it round and his son takes the middle bit like he always does.

This has been going on a while. He has done the obvious things about it. He has slowed down. He has tried saying it with his eyes closed and then with his eyes open. He has read a book about it. Nothing has moved, and what he has quietly begun to conclude is that God is somewhere and he is somewhere else and the words are a bridge that no longer reaches.

Friend, hand the loaf on and stay standing a minute. Because there is a verse about distance that measures it exactly, and I do not think you have ever let it be about you.

The distance in that verse is zero

Moses is at the end of his life and he is answering an objection that nobody has made out loud yet. The objection is: this is too high for us, somebody would have to go up and fetch it, somebody would have to cross the sea and bring it back.

And he says no. Look where it is.

But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.Deuteronomy 30:14

Two locations. Your mouth and your heart. That is the whole address.

Which means the distance being described is not small, it is zero. There is no gap to cross. The thing you have been assuming has gone far away is being reported as already inside the person doing the assuming.

You are already carrying the word in the two places it names, and the distance in that verse was measured at nothing. That is not a reassuring gloss on an old sermon; Deuteronomy 30:14 puts it in your mouth and in your heart and nowhere further off, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a farewell speech and stands it up in a dining room on a Friday with a loaf on a split board. What has gone quiet is not the distance. The distance was never the problem.

Now let me say the second thing, because you have been working on the wrong end of this.

You slowed down. You closed your eyes. You read a book. All of that is aimed at your delivery, as though the words were a transmission that had gone weak and needed better technique at the sending end.

But the verse does not treat the word as something you transmit. It treats it as something lodged in you. And a thing lodged in you does not require better technique. It requires nothing at all from you. It is simply there, in your mouth, on a Friday, whether or not you can feel it while you say it.

You have the word in you regardless of how it sounds coming out, and its being there does not wait on your delivery. Colossians 3:16 says let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, and dwelling is a settled residence rather than a performance, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes it a live tenancy in a person rather than a phrase in a letter. It lives there. It is not visiting on the strength of how well you speak.

Why the same words go flat, and what that is not

One more thing, and it is worth saying plainly because you have been drawing a conclusion from it.

Repetition does two things to a person, and they are opposites, and both are true.

It wears a groove. A thing said a thousand times can be said when you have nothing left, which is exactly why it was given as a repeated thing, and exactly why old people who have lost almost everything can still say it.

And it deadens the surface. The mind stops arriving fresh at what it has fully predicted. That is not spiritual decline. It is how a mind works with anything at all, and it happens to the best men in any tradition.

You are experiencing something ordinary about repetition rather than something serious about your soul, and the groove it wore is a mercy you will need one day. Psalm 119:11 says thy word have I hid in mine heart, which is language about storage and not about feeling, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a stored thing alive in a person while the surface of it goes quiet. The words are not thinner. Your ear has simply learned them.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and that verse says so explicitly.

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 freshness of a man saying old words on a Friday. 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.