Who Was That

Dan got asked to close in prayer and something happened to his voice.

He had been himself all evening. Properly himself. He had told the story about the caravan and the wasps and had everybody in bits, and he had said a genuinely wise thing about his brother that made the room go quiet in the good way, and he had eaten four of the biscuits that were meant for eight people.

Then the leader said, "Dan, would you close us?"

And Dan said, "Sure."

And then Dan said: "Father God, we do just come before You this evening, Lord, and we just thank You, Father God, that You are a God who is faithful, Lord, and we just ask, Father, that You would be with each and every one of us, Lord, as we go from this place, Father God, and we just pray that You would bless the going out and the coming in, Lord God."

Ninety seconds of it. About forty percent of the words were just, Father God, and Lord, and none of the sentences quite finished, and his voice had dropped about a third lower than his actual voice and gone slightly to the back of his throat.

Everybody said amen. Everybody meant it. It was a warm room.

And in the car park afterward, his mate Sof, who has known him since they were fifteen and has no filter whatsoever, said, "Mate. Who was that?"

Dan said, "What?"

"That. In there. Who was that? Because it was not you."

And Dan started laughing, and then stopped laughing, and stood there in the dark with his keys in his hand.

Because on the way in, in the car, Dan had said something to God. Out loud, at a set of lights, in his own voice, about his brother. It was one sentence, it had a swear word missing from the middle of it where he had caught himself, and it was the truest thing he had said in a month.

And forty minutes later he could not have said that sentence in a room full of people if you had paid him.

Now. Let me ask you about your other voice.

You know the one. It comes out when you are asked to pray out loud, or when somebody at work asks you a direct question about faith, or when you are writing something down for a person you want to be careful with.

It is lower, or it is smoother, or it has words in it you have never used in a shop. And you are not being fake, that is what stings. You are being reverent, or you are being safe, or you are being what you were taught. But it is not the voice you think in, and some part of you knows that, and hears it, and winces.

He knows before you open your mouth

Jesus says something about prayer that would have been much easier for everybody if He had left it out.

And when you are praying, do not use meaningless repetition as the Gentiles do, for they suppose that they will be heard for their many words. So do not be like them; for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him.Matthew 6:7 to 8

Read the reason He gives, because the reason is not what you would expect.

He does not say plain speech is more humble, though it is. He does not say long prayers are vanity, though they can be. He says your Father knows what you need before you ask Him, which means the padding is not offensive so much as unnecessary. You are filling a gap that was never there.

The many words exist to close a distance. And there is no distance.

So hear this over you, tonight. You are already fully understood by the One you are speaking to, before the first syllable, and the second voice you put on has never once improved His hearing. That is written down in red, and the Holy Spirit is described in Scripture as the one who helps in our weakness and intercedes for us, which means the very worst prayer you have ever prayed had a translator on it before it left the room.

Now let me say something kind about your other voice, because I am not here to mock a room full of people who love God.

That voice came from somewhere good.

You learned it by listening to people who were praying sincerely, and you copied it the way anybody learns anything, and behind every we just come before You is somebody genuinely reaching for God without wanting to sound arrogant. It is not hypocrisy. It is an accent, picked up in a place you loved.

But an accent can become a wall. And here is how you know yours has: when the real thing happens, you cannot use it.

That is what happened to Dan. His true sentence was in the car. His public sentence was in the room. And a man who can only tell God the truth at traffic lights is a man carrying something alone that he does not need to carry alone.

You are allowed to talk to God the way you talk. Not because reverence is out of date, but because He is your Father and He already knows, and the written word is plain that the Spirit carries what we cannot even word properly. That is the ground, and it is His Spirit who makes an honest sentence possible when it will not come.

There was a man five hundred years ago who took the most sacred book in Europe out of a language only the trained could read and put it into the language of a mother and a butcher and a child in the street, and got shouted at for it, and did it anyway. His argument was that God had never asked to be addressed in a special register, and that a faith which cannot be said in a kitchen is not being said at all.

Not too holy to be clear. That was his rule and it is a good one for your prayers too.