The Word I Never Said About It

Petre had taught the Monday evening class for nine years, in a room with the door propped open onto a bright street because the radiator had two settings and neither of them was off.

He could set it all out without notes. What belongs to a citizen of that country and what nobody is permitted to take away. Which counter you go to. Which line you stand in. Which form is not for you at all, because that form is for guests.

He had held it himself for twelve years.

And in twelve years he had never once said my country. He said here. He said this country. He said your schools to women whose children sat in them, and he did not hear himself do it, and nobody had ever pointed it out, because everybody liked him and it seemed a small thing.

On the last evening of the course a woman named Ana, who was sixty and had passed her test that morning and was easily the happiest person in the building, would not sit down.

"Say it with me," she said. "Say the sentence."

"Which sentence?"

"The one you make us say. Every week. This is my country and these belong to me."

The class said it, ragged and pleased with themselves, the way a room says a thing it has said fifteen times.

Petre opened his mouth and got as far as "This is."

Then he stopped.

And laughed, because it was absurd, and because there is nothing else to do when a room of thirty people has just watched you fail at a sentence you wrote.

Ana, who was sixty and had precisely nothing left to lose, folded her arms. "No. Properly. Say it."

And somebody at the back started that slow deliberate clapping, and then everybody was at it, and the door was standing open onto the bright street with people going past looking in, and Petre stood there with a piece of chalk in one hand.

He said it. Badly, and much too quietly.

Ana said, "Again. Louder."

He said it again, louder, and something happened in his face that the front row talked about afterwards in the street.

And there is an inheritance you can list. You know the passages. You could set out accurately, to a person who had never heard any of it, what belongs to somebody inside this covenant. And you have never once used the word mine about a single item on that list.

What the document actually hands over

Start with the sentence itself, because the habit of describing it in the third person is exactly what this article is trying to interrupt.

knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.Colossians 3:24

Read who the giver is and who the receiver is. From the Lord. To you. Not to the general category of believers, considered abstractly, about whom a man can speak fluently for nine years, and the Holy Spirit was not being vague about the pronoun when He put it there.

You are inside the sentence Paul is writing there, not standing beside it holding a piece of chalk, and Colossians 3:24 does not have a separate clause for the person who explains it to everybody else. The Holy Spirit put the second person into that verse on purpose.

Now the harder question, which is what the inheritance actually is, because this is where people quietly install something God never named.

And the LORD said to Aaron, "You shall have no inheritance in their land, neither shall you have any portion among them. I am your portion and your inheritance among the people of Israel."Numbers 18:20

That is God, in the first person, naming Himself as the thing inherited. Not fields. Not a share of anything. Himself, and His Spirit is how a portion like that is actually held by a person rather than admired from a distance.

And the Holy Spirit sits inside this in a way that is easy to read past, because Paul says the sealing is itself the guarantee.

In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance.Ephesians 1:13 and 14

You were sealed, which is a thing done to a person and not a status a person maintains, and Ephesians 1:14 says the Spirit who did it is Himself the guarantee of what is coming. Nobody seals a guest.

Which half is settled, and what is left for you to do

Here is the line down the middle, and it goes here rather than at the end where a reader would rightly distrust it.

The giving is His and it is settled. He named Himself as the portion and He sealed the ones He named it to, and no part of that waits on your vocabulary. What is asked of you is real: take hold of it. Say it. Serve as somebody who owns what he is handling rather than somebody minding it for an absent family.

That is a genuine term and I am not going to shrink it into a feeling. Petre's twelve years of saying here rather than mine did not cost him his citizenship, and it cost him something. A man can hold a thing completely and live in it as a lodger, and the loss is not in the document, it is in the twelve years.

What I will not do is tell you what is coming to you, in what form, or when. There is no figure anywhere in this and no forecast about your circumstances, and any article that gives you one has stopped reading the terms and started guessing. What Scripture names is what gets named here: God Himself as your portion, and a sealing you did not perform.

You have that on the strength of Numbers 18:20 and Ephesians 1:14 rather than on the strength of how convinced you sound, and the Spirit who sealed you is not standing at the edge of the room waiting to hear whether you can say it well.