Six Weeks Without Saying Anything

Tarek came six weeks running and did not say one word.

He came early, which nobody noticed, and he stacked the chairs afterward, which everybody noticed and nobody mentioned. He poured the tea. He laughed at the right places. And when the talking started, he looked at the table.

The others were not showing off. That is important. They were good men, and one of them had studied, and the vocabulary was simply what they had. Words about covenant and imputation and the divided kingdom, dropped into a sentence the way you would drop in a street name, with no idea that a man across the table had gone completely still.

Tarek drives a forklift at a distribution park off the ring road. He left school at fifteen because his father was ill. He can hold six loading schedules in his head and he can tell you which of forty drivers can be trusted in the wet, and he has never in his life said the word soteriology and does not intend to start.

On the sixth week, Ismail, who was hosting, did something either brave or careless.

He said, "Tarek. You have not said anything for six weeks. What do you make of it?"

And the whole terrace went quiet, and Tarek went the color of the tea.

He said, "I have not got the words for this room."

Ismail said, "Say it in the words you have got."

Long pause. A moped going past below. And then Tarek said this, looking at his glass:

"I think it is like when a man comes to the gate at four in the morning and the gate is already open. And he has got his paperwork out, and he is looking for who to give it to. And there is nobody there to take it, because the one who owns the yard opened the gate himself and went to bed."

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Then the one who had studied put his glass down and said, "That is better than anything I have said in six weeks."

Now let me talk to you, because you have been in that room too.

Maybe it is a study group. Maybe it is the front of a church where people pray in a register you cannot reproduce. Maybe it is a family, and everybody else has the language, and you are the one who went quiet somewhere around 2019 and has been quiet ever since.

And you have concluded something from it that is not true. You have concluded that you do not have anything, when the truth is only that you do not have the vocabulary.

Clarity is the standard, and it is Paul's

Paul is dealing with a church that has fallen in love with impressive speech, and he settles it with a comparison anybody can follow.

So also you, unless you utter by the tongue speech that is clear, how will it be known what is spoken? For you will be speaking into the air.1 Corinthians 14:9

That is not a small aside. Paul spends most of a chapter on it, and his whole argument is that a thing said impressively and not understood has failed, however true it was.

Speech that is clear. The word underneath it means well marked, easy to recognize, the way a good road sign is. Not simple in the sense of shallow. Clear in the sense of arriving.

So hear this over you, in the room where you went quiet. You have understanding that the room needs, and the fact that it comes out as a gate at four in the morning rather than as a technical term does not make it smaller. That is written down, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the teacher in a person, and He has never once required a vocabulary from anybody before He would teach them.

Now let me guard something immediately, because this message goes wrong in the hands of a resentful reader.

The men with the long words are not the enemy.

They were not performing. Study is a good thing and the church has always needed people who will sit with a difficult text for years, and every single word you find intimidating was invented by somebody trying to be more precise rather than less. Precision is a service. A person who has labored over a text and can tell you exactly what it does not mean has done real work on your behalf.

The problem is never that a word is long. The problem is when the long word is the only door, and somebody stands outside it deciding they are not the kind of person who gets in.

You are the kind of person who gets in. Scripture was not written in a temple dialect; the New Testament was written in the ordinary Greek of a market and a barracks, the language of receipts and letters home, and that was not an accident.

You are being taught, right now, by the Spirit of God Himself, and the language He is teaching you in is the one you actually think in. That is written, and it means the four in the morning gate was not you failing to reach the standard. It was you reaching it.

There was a man five hundred years ago who spent months on one book of the Bible with a simple question in front of him: what would a mother in a house, a child in a street, and an ordinary man at a market actually say? He was one of the most educated men in Europe and he could have written it for the educated. He wrote it for the market on purpose, and when he was criticized for it he said the point was not to ask the Latin how it should be said, but to ask the mother and the child.

Not too holy to be clear. That is the whole of it.