The Mood I Read Off the Morning

The alarm is set for six forty and she has never once got up at six forty.

Six fifty two, then. Which is fine, which is inside tolerance, except that the hot water has already been used by somebody upstairs and the shower goes lukewarm and then honest. She gets out fast. She is standing on the bathmat with her hair dripping down her back thinking a thought she would not say out loud, and the thought is roughly: right.

Because there is a system running. She has never written it down. Nobody taught it to her and she would deny it if you asked her straight. But it runs every single morning and it goes like this. If the first hour is smooth, God is pleased with her. If the first hour is not smooth, she has done something, and she starts going back through yesterday looking for it.

So. Lukewarm shower. That is one.

The milk in the fridge door has turned, which she discovers with her nose about four inches away from it, and there is no shop between here and the bus. Two.

She misses the bus by the width of a road. Actually stands there and watches the indicator go off and the doors close, and the driver sees her, and does the small apologetic shrug that drivers do. Three.

And on the next one, fourteen minutes later, wedged in behind the stairs with her bag on her feet, she opens her phone and there is the email, the one she had been assuming would say one thing and which says a different thing, and it is not a disaster, it is just a no.

Four. By eight fifteen the verdict is in and it is not a good one, and she carries it around all day like a wet coat.

But here is the thing that happens on that bus, and it happens because she is tired enough to think honestly.

She remembers last Tuesday. Last Tuesday the alarm worked, the shower was hot, she got the earlier bus and had eleven minutes spare and bought a pastry, and she walked into that building feeling, in a way she could not have defended, approved of.

And last Tuesday was the day she was short with her mother on the phone, and knew it at the time, and did not ring back.

So the instrument gave her a green light on the day she was worst, and it is giving her a red one today for a shower and a bus. Which means it is not measuring what she thought it was measuring. It has never once been pointed at God. It has been pointed at the weather.

He did not have to swear anything

There is a strange sentence in Hebrews, and I want to slow you down at it, because most people read past the strangeness.

Thus God, determining to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of His purpose, guaranteed it with an oath, so that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we might have strong encouragement.Hebrews 6:17-18

Read what it says God did. He had already promised. His promise was already true, because He is God and He does not lie, and there was nothing missing from it and nothing anybody could add.

And He swore anyway.

People swear oaths because their bare word is not enough. Mine is not always enough; yours is not always enough; so we sign things and we shake hands and we say it in front of witnesses, and everybody understands why. God has no such problem. His word alone is unbreakable. He put an oath on top of it regardless, and Hebrews tells you the reason in plain language: so that we might have strong encouragement.

Not so that it would be more true. It could not be more true. So that we would have something to hold on a morning like the one you have just had.

Turn that toward yourself now, because it was aimed at you before you were born. You have two unchangeable things standing under you before your alarm went off, and the second one exists purely because God knew what you would be like at ten past eight. Hebrews 6:18 says it is impossible for Him to lie, and the Holy Spirit is the One putting that impossible under your feet this morning instead of leaving it as an interesting fact about God.

Two instruments, and only one of them is calibrated

Your mood is real. I am not going to tell you it is not, and I am not going to tell you to ignore it. Your mood knows about the shower, and about six hours of sleep, and about the milk, and about being told no in writing before nine in the morning. It is reporting accurately on all of that.

It simply has no access to God's disposition toward you. None. It has never been connected to that. Asking it what God thinks is like asking the bathroom scale what your mother thinks.

An oath has access. An oath is a sentence God said out loud about what He has bound Himself to, and it does not consult the morning before it applies. It applied on last Tuesday when you were short on the phone, and it applies today when you did nothing wrong at all and everything went sideways anyway. It did not go up on the good day. It has not come down on the bad one.

That is what the whole of this site means by covenant, and it is worth saying plainly so nothing sneaks back in: an oath is not an arrangement with terms. There is nothing in this for you to hold up. God bound God. You are the one He bound Himself toward, and the binding is His act from end to end, and the Spirit that Scripture calls the guarantee is inside you making that a felt thing and not only a filed one.

The anchor is not in the room you are standing in

The passage goes on, and it gives you a picture that should follow you around all week.

We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain.Hebrews 6:19

An anchor does not hold because the boat is calm. An anchor is the entire reason a boat survives not being calm. And notice where this one is set. Not in your circumstances, not in your temperament, not in the first hour of your day. Behind the curtain, in the one place in the universe that no morning can reach and nothing has ever gone wrong.

So the deck is going to move. Decks do. What Scripture says is settled is where the chain goes, and His Spirit is the One holding that chain taut in you on a lukewarm morning when you cannot feel a single thing.