What Is Mine Today

The music started up before the food was even properly out, which is how it always goes, and half the yard was moving before anybody had decided to.

Dionne was standing near the end of the table trying to be helpful and mostly being in the way, and one of the mothers pushed a plate into her hands, and Dionne looked down at it and stopped.

It was a real plate. Heavy. The good church set, the white ones with the thin gold line, the ones that live in the locked cabinet in the back of the hall.

"You use these out here?" she said. "In the yard?"

And the woman did not even slow down. She said, "Baby. What else would we be saving them for?"

And then she was gone with an armful of napkins, and Dionne stood there holding a good plate under a tree with music going and did not move for about four seconds.

Because her mother had a set of dishes.

They were beautiful and they never came out. Not at Christmas, not at birthdays, not at either of the graduations. They were for a later that was always being described and never arrived. And when her mother died, Dionne wrapped every one of them in newspaper, unchipped, unused, and cried in a way she could not fully explain to anybody.

Later had eaten the whole thing.

And she has caught herself doing it. The front room nobody sits in. The good soap in the bag under the sink. The vacation she has been almost taking for six years. A whole life in a cabinet with later written across the front of it.

And you know that cabinet, or you would have put this down by now.

Because it went further than dishes with you. Somewhere along the line, everything good about your life with God got described to you in the future tense. What He is going to do. What is coming. What will happen when the season turns. And you nodded, and you waited, and you have been waiting so long and so faithfully that you have genuinely never asked the other question.

What is mine today.

Not what is coming. What is mine right now, this morning, in this yard, while the music is going.

Come and take the plate. It is heavier than you expected and it is meant to be used.

Read the tense

Here is one sentence from the middle of a letter, and the whole of this message is in what tense it is written in.

This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.Ephesians 3:6

Are. Not shall be. Not are becoming. Not will one fine season be considered for. Three present-tense words stacked one on top of another: heirs, members, partakers, and every one of them is a status somebody holds this morning while the coffee is going cold.

So you are not standing in a waiting room, because Ephesians 3:6 puts every one of those words in the present tense and Paul had every future tense in Greek available to him and did not reach for one, and the Holy Spirit is at this moment taking that written tense and pressing it into a woman who has been living entirely in later.

And I want to be careful here, because this is the category where teachers overreach and start promising people things God never said. So let me be exact about what is being handed to you. I am not telling you what your circumstances are about to do. Nobody on this site is authorized to forecast your life, and I would not do it if I were.

What is named here is what Scripture names, and it is not small.

What the document actually gives you today

Start with the thing that took the longest for anybody to say out loud in the ancient world, because it is the thing your whole heart is actually asking about.

and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty.2 Corinthians 6:18

That is God speaking in the first person, binding Himself to a relationship rather than to an event. Read what He does not say. He does not say I will consider it. He does not say I will be a father to you once a few things have settled down. He states what He is to you and what you are to Him, and that is the founding term of the whole inheritance, because everything an heir has, she has by being family.

The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ.Romans 8:16 and 17

Follow the logic of that sentence, because it is a legal chain and it moves fast. Children, therefore heirs. Not children who might one day be considered as heirs. The status follows directly from the family, and there is no waiting period written between the two clauses.

You are an heir this morning rather than a candidate for one, and Romans 8:17 is where the chain is written down rather than a nice thing somebody said at a women's meeting, and the Spirit is described in that very verse as the One who bears witness to it inside you, which means the confirmation is not something you have to generate.

And here is where the halves sit, plainly, in the middle of this rather than at the end. Your status is God's half, and it is settled, and it was settled by His own oath and by what Christ did. Your half is a response, and it is real, and it is asked, and it is not what makes you an heir. Both are true in the same yard on the same morning.

What taking hold looks like

So what do you actually do with a thing that is already yours?

You use it. That is the whole answer and it is unglamorous.

An heir who never opens the house is still an heir, and she is also cold. Nothing about her status changes and everything about her life does. Taking hold is not a ritual and it is not a spiritual technique; it is a woman deciding to live in the room she has been standing outside of.

And this is where your response is real, so let me say it without softening it. You are asked to come. You are asked to draw near, to speak to Him as a daughter speaks in her own father's house, to bring the thing rather than manage it privately, to walk with Him in the ordinary day. Those are terms, they are written in His word, and the Spirit is the One who moves a daughter to answer them.

But not one of them makes you family. They are what family does.

You have access this morning rather than an appointment pending, because 2 Corinthians 6:18 has God saying He is a father to you in the present tense of the relationship, and His Spirit is the One who makes a written status into something a person actually walks in.