The Gate Propped Open

You can hear it from the kitchen with the window open, which it is, because it is that kind of evening.

Three doors down. Somebody's fortieth or a leaving do or nothing at all, and it does not matter which because the sound is the same: a dozen people, a lot of children, a dog that is very excited about the whole arrangement, and at some point somebody will put music on that is slightly too loud for about twenty minutes and then somebody will turn it down.

The gate at the side is propped open with a brick. That is deliberate. That is the whole message of a propped gate on a summer evening in a street like that one, and every person on it knows how to read it.

He got the invitation in the ordinary way, which is a woman saying over a fence, we are having a thing on Saturday, come.

And he has an explanation. He has several, and they are all reasonable, and that is what makes this hard.

He does not really know them. He is not good at that sort of thing. It will be full of people from her work. He does not want to be the one standing at the edge holding a bottle. He has an early start. And every one of those is a true sentence, and together they have kept him in a kitchen for three summers running with the window open.

Sit down here with me, friend. Today I am speaking to the one who did something a good way back, brought it to God straight and meant it entirely, and has a set of reasonable explanations that have quietly taken over the running of things.

And before you brace for it: nobody here is setting you a pace, and not going is not a sin, and this site will never once call it one.

What Paul actually names

Paul is writing to a young man who is hanging back. That is the situation of the whole letter. Timothy has been given something and is not using it, and Paul, who is in prison and near the end, writes him a sentence that has been quoted at nervous people ever since and is usually quoted at them wrongly.

For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.2 Timothy 1:7

Read the list, because there are three things in it and almost everybody only remembers the first one.

Power. Yes.

Love. Which is the reason a person moves toward other people at all.

And a sound mind, which in the Greek is sophronismos, and which is one of the least romantic words in the New Testament. It means a settled, disciplined, sensible mind. Sanity. Good judgment.

Now notice what that does to the argument you have been having with yourself.

You have been treating this as a contest between fear and recklessness, and you have chosen sensibly, and you have chosen sensibly for three summers. But sense is on the list. God gave it. It is one of the three things named as His gift, which means the thing keeping you in the kitchen cannot be claiming that ground, because that ground is already occupied.

You have been given a settled mind by God, and you were never choosing between fear and foolishness. I am not offering you a rebuke dressed as encouragement. The written word puts sound judgment in the same list as power and love and names all three as gifts, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it into a kitchen with the window open on a Saturday.

Fear wearing the name of sense

Here is the distinction, and I want to make it without one ounce of blame in it, because you have not been a coward and I will not have it called that.

Fear is not a sin. Let me say that plainly, because somebody may have implied otherwise to you and they were wrong. Paul does not say fear is wicked. He says it is not what was issued to us. That is a supply question, not a morals question.

But fear is clever, and its cleverest move is to stop arguing and start agreeing with you. It does not tell a grown man he is frightened of a barbecue. It tells him he does not really know them, and that he has an early start, and both of those are true.

The tell is not whether the reasons are true. The tell is whether they are load bearing. Take one away and see whether the decision changes. If it does not, the reasons were not doing the work.

You are supplied with sense that does not need to keep you at home, and you were never issued the thing that has been using its name. Scripture separates the two in that one verse, and it is His Spirit, not a resolution made at the sink, who lets a man tell them apart on a Saturday evening.