Known Before the Word Is on the Tongue

Amos has been trying to write one sentence for about a year and he is a man who is good with sentences.

That is what makes it strange. He teaches. He writes things that other people read on purpose. Give him a difficult idea and forty minutes and he will hand you back something clear enough that you wonder why it was ever difficult.

And there is a thing in his life, and he has been trying to put it into a sentence since roughly last autumn, and he cannot.

He has approached it from every direction he knows. He has tried the plain version and it comes out too small, so small that saying it would misrepresent it. He has tried the honest version and it comes out enormous and theatrical and also not true. He has tried writing round it, which is his usual trick, coming at a thing sideways until it shows itself, and it will not show itself.

So he has not prayed about it.

Not once, not properly, in a year. And here is his reasoning, which he has never examined because he has never said it out loud even to himself: he cannot take a thing to God until he can state it. Prayer, in his understanding, runs on sentences. He has no sentence. Therefore he has nothing to bring.

He would never say that about anybody else. If a student came to him and said I cannot pray because I cannot phrase it, he would know exactly what to say, and he would say it kindly, and it would help.

He has simply never turned it round and pointed it at himself, because from the inside it does not feel like a theological position. It feels like waiting until you are ready.

And this is where I stop writing about Amos, because you have been building a sentence.

Maybe for a year. Maybe for longer than that. I am not going to ask what it is about and I will not guess at it once between here and the end. It is yours and it stays yours.

The verse is about the gap

I want to put a line in front of you that people quote for its comfort and almost never read for its timing, and the timing is the whole thing.

For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O LORD, thou knowest it altogether.Psalm 139:4

Look at where God is standing in that sentence.

Not at the end of the speech, receiving it. Not even at the beginning of the speech, listening. He is before the speech. The verse describes a moment when the word is not yet in the mouth, when it is still unformed, when it is a pressure and not a phrase, and it says that at that point it is already known altogether.

Altogether is the word to sit with. Not partly, not in outline, not the gist of it. The whole of it, complete, before one syllable exists.

Which takes the entire year of failed sentences and turns it into something other than a delay.

So take it where you actually sit. You are already fully known in the thing you cannot phrase, and Psalm 139:4 puts the knowing before the word rather than after it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who prays in a person when the person has run out of language, which is exactly what Romans 8 says He does.

And that is worth pausing on, because it is not a poetic flourish. Scripture is explicit that the Spirit makes intercession with groanings which cannot be uttered. Cannot be uttered. The New Testament has a category for prayer with no sentence in it, and it does not treat that category as second best; it treats it as the Spirit Himself doing the carrying.

So the year was not a year of not praying. It was a year of praying without noticing, because you had defined prayer as the thing you could not do. The written word has been counting it the whole time, and His Spirit has been the one forming it.