There are eight of them in a row and six are working, and the one on the end has had a laminated sign on it since a week last Tuesday.
She is on number three. Bananas, which need the little search screen and the button for loose items. A box of something that will not scan at all and has to be done twice. Bread. And the machine is talking to her the whole time in that voice they all have, the one designed by somebody who had never met a human being: please place the item in the bagging area. unexpected item in the bagging area. please wait, assistance is on its way.
A young lad with a lanyard comes over, does the thing with his card, says these ones are terrible, and goes again.
And underneath the machine's voice, running the entire time, at a volume nobody else in that shop can hear, is the other one.
The other one is not impersonal. That is the difference. The machine says unexpected item because a weight sensor registered a discrepancy. The other voice says things about her, in her own accent, about who she is and what she is like and what people would think, and it has been doing it since about six that morning, and it has been doing it for a very long time.
She would not read that voice out loud. Not to her sister, not to anybody. Some of it she would not repeat about a stranger.
And if something in you went quiet reading that, I want to talk to you and not around you. Not about the thing under it, whatever that is. I am not going to ask you for it. I want to talk about the voice, and specifically about what kind of thing it actually is, because you have been treating it as a report.
A report has a source, and this one has been unexamined for years
Let me start with the thing I am not going to do.
I am not going to tell you off for it. Self contempt is not pride, whatever you have been told by somebody who meant well, and I am not going to hand you a rebuke on top of a voice that has been rebuking you since breakfast. That would be the cruellest possible response and it is a very common one.
I am also not going to argue with it. You have argued with it for years. You are better at arguing with it than I am, and it has never once conceded a point, because a voice like that is not conducting a debate.
What I am going to do is put a second document on the table.
But the LORD said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature, because I have refused him: for the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart.1 Samuel 16:7
Notice the situation. Samuel is a prophet, and he is assessing, and he is confidently wrong. Seven times in a row. He looks at a tall impressive man and concludes, and God stops him.
And God does not say you are being too harsh or you are being too generous. He says the whole instrument is wrong. The LORD seeth not as man seeth. It is not a matter of calibration. It is a different faculty looking at a different thing.
You are seen by a God whose looking is different in kind from the looking you have been doing, and you were never being assessed by the instrument you have been using. I am not offering you a warm opinion. The written word puts God's seeing and man's seeing in two separate categories in that verse, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it under a voice that has been running since six.
His account is not a nicer version of yours
Here is the thing that keeps people stuck for decades, and it is worth naming exactly.
You have assumed that God's opinion of you is your own commentary with the volume turned down and a few kind words added. So when you try to receive it, you are essentially trying to make yourself feel better about the same document, and that never works, because you know the document too well.
It is not the same document.
The commentary is a running assessment of the outward, made from the inside, by somebody who has been present at every one of your worst hours and no others. God's account is made by Someone who looks at the heart, who has the whole of it in view, who was there for the hours nobody else saw, and who is not composing an opinion at all but stating what is.
You have an account of yourself that God wrote and you were not asked to agree with the other one. That is what the written word puts in front of Samuel in that moment, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a second document readable to somebody who has only ever had the first.
So we are not going to argue with the voice today. We are going to put something beside it.
Take a piece of paper. Write down, in the voice's own words, one sentence you habitually say about yourself. Not the worst one. Just a usual one, the one that turns up on ordinary days.
Then underneath it, write one sentence God says. From Scripture, in the second person, about you. You are accepted in the Beloved. You are His workmanship. You are not condemned. Any true one will do.
And then read the second one out loud, once.
That is the whole exercise. You are not required to feel anything about it. You are not required to believe the second one more than the first today, and if you do not, that is my work still to do and it is not one thing about you.
And one plain word first, because a page is not always the help a person needs. If what runs under this has gone past a heavy stretch into hours when being here at all feels like too much, tell one living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line: 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. You never have to tell anybody the thing itself in order to ask for help staying.
You are looked at by God at the heart, and you were being looked at that way through every one of the years you were reading the other page. That is what the written word settles in 1 Samuel 16, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it off a page and into a supermarket on an ordinary morning.
Declare this over yourself
You are in Christ and Christ is in you, and that is the ground under every word coming next. This is not a feeling being worked up. It is agreement out loud with an account God wrote about you, and how it sits tonight, and how it sits in a month, the outcome is His. The written word is what settled it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it.
- Machine at the self checkout, you are a scale and a speaker and a light on a pole. You call an unexpected item and you have never once had an opinion about a person. The written word says God looks at the heart, and I am doing my shopping with one voice in this shop and not two.
- Running commentary I would not read out, you are not a report and you never were, and I refuse your findings in the name of Jesus. Samuel assessed seven men in a row and got every one of them wrong. The instrument is the problem, and God said so before I ever did.
- Lord, You see what a man cannot see and You are not composing an opinion. I am reading Your sentence out loud today instead of mine. And You have been looking at the heart on every single morning I spent reading the other page.
1 Samuel 16:7
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