Last But One Through the Funnel

The funnel is two lines of tape held up on plastic poles that somebody carries in a bag every Saturday morning, and it is nine in the morning and it has been raining and the grass at the end has been churned into something that is not really grass any more.

He comes through second from last.

There is a woman about twenty yards behind him who is walking now and is going to finish and is being cheered by absolutely everybody, and rightly so, and she is going to be the best story of the morning. He is ahead of her. He is not the story. He is a man in his fifties in a running top he has had for a decade, breathing hard, going through the tape at somewhere north of forty minutes for five kilometers.

And two marshals are still clapping. Not politely. Properly, with the specific warmth those people have at that end of the funnel, which everybody who has ever come through it slowly will tell you about.

Somebody hands him a token. Somebody says well done, mate. There is a boy of about nine giving out the tokens who says it with enormous seriousness.

By the time he is at the water fountain, the account has started.

He knows it well. It has a section on the time, and a section on the year he stopped, and a section that goes further back than running, and it is delivered in his own voice with a great deal of supporting material, and it has been the only account of him he has heard on a Saturday morning for a long time.

If you know that account, come and sit on the wall here. Today I am speaking to the one who did something a long way back, took it to God straight, meant it entirely, and has been the only witness in his own case ever since.

Nothing is settled on one witness

There is a rule in Scripture that runs from the Law right through to the letters, and it is worth having in front of you this morning.

Nothing is established on the word of one witness. Two, or three, or it does not stand. It is in Deuteronomy, Jesus quotes it, Paul quotes it twice. It is one of the most consistently repeated procedural rules in the whole of the Bible.

Now count the witnesses in your case.

One. Your own commentary. It has been in the box for years, it gives evidence every Saturday, and it has never once been examined, and no matter has ever been established on a single witness in the entire history of God's dealings with people.

The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.Romans 8:16

With our spirit. Not instead of. Paul is describing two witnesses in the box at once, which is exactly the number the rule requires, and he tells you what the second one says.

He does not say the Spirit testifies about your times, or your record, or how the year went. He says the Spirit testifies to what you are. A child of God. That is the matter under examination and that is the thing established.

You have a second witness testifying about what you are, and you were never going to settle a matter with only your own voice in the box. I am not offering you an encouragement. The written word requires two witnesses and then names the second one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it into a man at a water fountain on a Saturday.

What the second witness is actually testifying to

Here is what I want you to notice, because it is easy to miss and it is the whole comfort.

The two witnesses are not testifying about the same thing.

Your commentary gives evidence about performance. It always has. The time, the effort, the record, the year, and further back than that, the thing itself. It is a witness about doing.

The Spirit gives evidence about sonship. He does not enter the performance debate at all. He is not in the box to argue that the time was better than you think. He is there to establish a completely different fact, and that fact is the one the whole case turns on.

So the two of them are not even contradicting one another, which is why arguing between them has never resolved anything. One of them is answering a question that was never the question.

You are a child of God and that is what the second witness has been testifying to, and you were never on trial for your times. Scripture puts sonship rather than performance in the Spirit's mouth in that verse, and it is His Spirit, not a better Saturday, who makes a settled matter land in a man's chest.