For the one who freezes in a lift and spends the afternoon rewriting the answer.
The doors close on the ground floor and there are two of you in it, which is the worst possible number.
He's from the other team on the floor below. You know his first name and nothing else about him at all, which is the ordinary condition of most working relationships. He's got a coffee in one hand and a badge on a blue lanyard. He makes the remark people make about the weather, and you make the remark back.
Then, somewhere around two, he asks where you go to church.
You have until the fourth floor, which is about nine seconds, and you spend the first four of them with your mouth slightly open, which he notices, because there is nobody else in a lift to look at.
You say you're between places at the moment. He says something kind. The doors open, you both get out, and you spend a genuinely surprising amount of the afternoon rewriting those nine seconds into something better.
Not once, either. Four or five times, in gaps between other work, each version a little more reasonable than the last, all of them delivered to a man who is no longer present.
You owed that colleague an answer and never an explanation. Scripture that your life is hidden with Christ in God, and the Spirit keeps it there whether or not a man in a lift ever hears about it.
The Debt You Invented Between Two and Four
Look at what you thought was being asked, because it was not what he asked.
He asked a small, ordinary, social question. It is the same size as asking where you live or where you went on holiday. He was making conversation in a lift with somebody he half knows, and he expected a short answer and then the doors.
What you heard was a request for the whole account. The years of going, why it stopped, what happened with the leadership, what you believe now, whether you've solved it, and whether you're all right.
That's a forty minute conversation with somebody who loves you. It isn't a lift exchange with a man from the other team, and no honest version of it fits into nine seconds, which is why you couldn't produce one.
None of that was requested. You supplied the question yourself, silently, in about half a second, and then failed to answer it in the time available.
He asked a small question and you answered a large one you invented. The written word never puts your standing in another person's hands, and the Spirit was not waiting on your reply either.
Your Life Is Hidden
Here is the verse, and the word worth stopping on is the one about where your life actually is.
For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.Colossians 3:3 (KJV)
Hid. Not displayed, not filed, not available for inspection at short notice by a colleague with a coffee. Your life is hidden with Christ in God, which is the safest address there has ever been.
A hidden life can't be assessed in a lift. It can't be summarized in nine seconds, and it doesn't become less real because the summary went badly.
There's freedom in that if you'll take it. The thing that matters most about you is the thing least available for inspection, which means no conversation you ever have in a corridor is carrying the weight you keep putting on it.
Paul wrote that to a scattered group of believers who had people around them constantly demanding an account of what they now were, and it reaches past that room to a lift without being stretched.
Your life is hidden with Christ rather than held up for inspection. The written word puts it in God's keeping, and the Spirit is the one guarding the address.
Nine Seconds Was Never the Problem
Be honest about the arithmetic, because you have been blaming the clock.
You have gone over again it as a timing failure. If the lift had gone to eleven, you would have had the room to explain properly and it would have gone well.
It wouldn't have gone well. It would have been longer. You'd have said too much to a man you barely know, watched his face while you did it, and spent the afternoon rewriting a longer speech instead of a shorter one.
You know this because it has happened. There was the conversation at the summer thing that went on for twenty minutes, and you rewrote that one for three days afterwards. More room has never once helped.
The problem was never the nine seconds. It was that you believed a debt was outstanding, and no amount of floors would have paid a debt that was never owed in the first place.
More floors would have produced a longer answer and the same afternoon. The written word settles your standing without a speech, and the Spirit does not require one from you either.
I Am Not Telling You to Say Nothing
Be careful here, because this can be misheard as permission to go silent, and that is not what I am handing you.
There is a good, true, short answer available, and it is worth having one ready. Something like this: you are not in a congregation at the moment, you still follow Christ, and it has been a strange couple of years. Eleven seconds, all of it true, none of it a defense.
Nor am I telling you that people who ask are hostile. Most of them are not. That man was being friendly and he thought nothing of it by the time he reached his desk.
What I want off you is the debt. Not the readiness to answer. Not the care for the person asking.
He Forgot by His Desk
Here is the turn, and it is slightly humbling, which is what makes it work.
You spent the afternoon on those nine seconds. He did not. He walked to his desk, put the coffee down, and had forgotten the exchange entirely before he opened his email.
He was not weighing your answer. He was not going to mention it to anybody. It was a lift remark, made by a man being pleasant to somebody from another team, and it occupied about four seconds of his day in total.
The trial you have been sitting through all afternoon had one participant. There was no jury, no prosecution, and the other man in the lift went back to work.
The only person still in that lift is you. The written word says your life is hidden with Christ in God, and the Spirit has never once treated you as being on trial.
Declare this over yourself
You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so what follows is not a claim made out of your own authority. It is agreement, said back to God in His own words, while the Holy Spirit carries it. How He orders the rest of it is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own time.
You have a standing you did not build, and this is spoken from inside it. Christ indwells you, the Spirit carries the words, and the result is God's to give in His own way.
Say it once, quietly, and finish.
I owed that colleague an answer and never an explanation, and the two are not the same debt. Scripture says that I am dead, and that my life is hidden with Christ in God, which is not an address anybody can inspect from inside a lift. The Spirit keeps it hidden there whether a man with a coffee ever hears about it. I am not paying a debt I invented between the second floor and the fourth. He asked a small question, I answered a large one nobody put to me, and he had forgotten the whole exchange by the time he reached his desk. I give the outcome to God and leave the sentence where it fell.
Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.
This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.
Colossians 3:3
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
