Able To Keep You From Falling

She has not hung up a coat in twenty years.

Anywhere. Somebody's kitchen, a hall, a friend's front room with a perfectly good hook six feet away, and the coat stays over the back of her chair, and she takes the seat nearest the door without ever deciding to. She has never once said why, not to herself in so many words, and if you asked her she would say she gets warm. She does not get warm. She keeps her exit dressed and ready, because a woman who has been asked to leave things learns to leave before she is asked.

And she can produce the list. The walking group. The choir, which she loved. The reading group that met on Thursdays for four years. The message thread she muted and then, six months later, quietly left. Every one of them has an ending and every ending has a reason, and the reason, in every single case, is her. She was too much that night. She said the thing about the money and it landed wrong. She went quiet for three weeks and by the time she looked up the shape of it had closed over. She has never once been able to construct a version where it was anybody else, and she has tried, because she is not a self-pitying woman.

You know the arithmetic she does, because you do it. Different rooms, same sum. If you were dropped tomorrow into a place full of people who wanted you there, you would enjoy it for a while, and underneath the enjoying you would already be running the calculation about how long you have got, because you have been in every one of those endings and you are the only element common to all of them.

Jude spends a whole letter on falling, and gives the last word to somebody else

Let me name the hard part before anything lifts, because it has been carried politely for a long time and politeness is heavy.

I am not going to tell you that none of it was ever you. You would not believe me, and you should not, and a comfort you have to switch your intelligence off to accept is not worth having. Some of it was you. Some of it was other people. Most of it was the ordinary way that human groups thin out and reform, which nobody narrates and everybody survives. You have been reading a common thing as a personal verdict, and reading it alone, which is what made it feel like a diagnosis.

But that is not actually the question. The question underneath the coat on the back of the chair is not who was at fault. It is who was holding the thing together. And in every one of those rooms you assumed the answer was you, which is why every ending arrived as your failure. If you are the load-bearing member of your own belonging, then of course a collapse is a verdict on you. It could not be a verdict on anything else.

Now read the last thing Jude says. He has just spent a short and blistering letter on people who did fall away, and this is where he puts his weight.

Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy.Jude 1:24

Able. It is a word about capacity, and look whose capacity it is. Not yours. Jude does not close by telling anybody to hold on tighter. He closes by pointing at an ability that belongs entirely to somebody else, and by handing the keeping to Him.

You are being kept by an ability that is not yours and never was, and no year of yours has ever been the thing holding it up. Jude 1:24, and then look who the verb belongs to: He is able, and you are the one being kept, and it is the Spirit who keeps a written ability from staying a nice theory about God.

And notice the second half, because that is where the exceeding joy lives. Faultless, presented, before glory. That is a description of an arrival. It is written about people who make it there, and it is written as something He does to them and not something they achieve on the way.

You have a keeping over you that has been operating through every ending on your list, including the ones you blame yourself for. That is written into the closing line of a letter and not into my encouragement of you, and the Holy Spirit is the hand underneath it.

You have never been the one holding it together

Here is the second thing, and it is the one that will change how tonight feels.

Your place among God's people is not a group. That is the piece the arithmetic keeps missing. A group is a thing people hold together, and groups do dissolve, and you have watched enough of them dissolve to know it in your bones. But God did not put you in a group. He made a people, He put you in it by His own act, and He named Himself as the one who maintains it.

So the maintenance is not on you. Not this week, not in a bad year, not in a stretch where you have said the wrong thing twice and gone quiet for a month.

You are one of God's people tonight, and your place among them is not a thing you have been asked to hold together. Scripture puts the verb on Him from the first clause to the last, and the same Spirit who did the joining in the first place is the one doing the holding now.

I am not going to tell you people are coming. I do not know that, and I will not spend your trust on a thing I cannot see. What I can tell you is what is already settled: the keeping. Whoever is in your kitchen this year and whoever is not, the household you belong to is being held by the One who described Himself as able, and that is a present arrangement and not a future one.

You were joined to this people by God and not by your own grip, and the holding of it does not depend on your strength this year or on your record of the last twenty. He wrote it down in Jude 1:24 and has not amended it since, with no condition attached anywhere about a track record, and the Holy Spirit is the seal on it.