I Will Take You To Me For A People

There are three boxes in her hall closet that have not been opened in nine years. The tape has gone the color of weak tea. The marker on the sides is her own handwriting from a night she barely remembers: KITCHEN 2, BOOKS, MISC. She has carried those boxes through two moves and never once cut them open, because opening them would mean this is where she lives, and she has never quite been ready to say that about anywhere.

On the windowsill there is a pothos in the plastic pot it came home in. She keeps meaning to repot it. Every spring she tells that plant the same thing she tells herself, which is that when things settle down she will do it properly, get the good soil, get a pot with a saucer, make it official. In the meantime she waters it on Saturdays and apologizes to it, the way a person apologizes to something they love and have not made room for.

Then one morning she goes to move the pot so she can sweep, and it will not come. She pulls harder and something under the floor pulls back. The roots have gone out through the drainage holes, down through the gap in the boards, into the dark under the house, and they have taken hold of something she cannot see and never approved. Nine years of waiting to be established. Established the whole time, underneath, while she was still saying not yet.

You know those boxes. You have been standing at the edge of your own life waiting to feel settled enough to count, waiting for the year that finally holds still, waiting until the faith stops feeling like a bag you are carrying by hand and starts feeling like a house you live in. And all that time there has been a sentence about you, spoken a very long while ago, that never once asked whether you were ready to agree with it.

The sentence where every verb belongs to God

In Exodus 6, God is speaking to a man who has already tried to help his own people and made it worse. Those people own nothing. They decide nothing. There is no assembly, no building, no roll of members, no elders, no address that belongs to any of them. There is a work quota, a river, and a very long silence. Into that, God says a run of sentences that all start the same way.

And I will take you to me for a people, and I will be to you a God: and ye shall know that I am the LORD your God, which bringeth you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians.Exodus 6:7

Read the verbs. I will take. I will be. I will bring. Not one of them belongs to Israel. Nobody in that verse qualifies for anything, applies for anything, gets established, gets steady, gets a good year behind them first. They are slaves on an ordinary working morning, and God simply announces what He intends to do with the pronoun.

That is what makes it good news instead of a standard. If being part of God's people were something a person assembled, then the assembling would be the qualification, and waiting until the pieces looked convincing would be the sensible thing to do. But the sentence is not built that way. The taking is His action, start to finish, and the object of a verb is never required to be ready.

You are one of God's people this morning, and the taking was His work rather than your paperwork. Exodus 6:7 puts every verb of it in God's own mouth, and the Spirit has already carried that sentence over the top of your unopened boxes.

Now let me say something about the word established, because it has been doing quiet damage in the dark, the way roots do. Most of us keep a private picture of what an established believer looks like: a settled week, a household that prays out loud, a shelf of well read books, someone who would notice within a day if the phone went silent. Measured against that picture, a person feels like somebody standing outside a lit window in a coat, looking in at the warm part. But that picture describes circumstances. Exodus 6 describes God.

You have a place among His people that was never issued on the strength of a good year. It went into the covenant while Israel still had no address of its own, it is written that way deliberately, and the same Spirit who sealed it is not waiting on anybody's circumstances to improve first.

Established is a word about what God does

Scripture does use that word about people. It just never uses it the way we use it against ourselves. Listen to David describe it from the inside, and notice who is doing the work.

He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.Psalm 40:2

He brought. He set. He established. The man in the clay contributes the clay. There is no version of that verse where he climbs out first and is then congratulated for arriving under his own power. Establishment, in the Bible, is something done to a person who was in no condition to do it for themselves, and it gets announced afterward rather than earned in advance.

You were taken before you were tidy, and tidy has never once been the entry. Psalm 40:2 hands the whole action to God, and His Spirit did the lifting while the clay was still all over everything.

So the waiting has been honest, and it has also been unnecessary. Honest, because the room really is quiet and nobody in that house says amen and the week really does keep moving the furniture around. Unnecessary, because none of that was ever load bearing. The load is carried at the other end. God said He would take a people to Himself, and He has never once gone back to check whether the people felt sufficiently established that week.

The waiting has no right to stay, and no seven days on a calendar get a vote on this. He promised a people to Himself in writing, and the Spirit is what turns a promise that old into a present tense somebody is standing inside of.