Stop Putting Your Foot Down

Bernie learned to swim at forty-three.

Not splashing about. Actual swimming, with a breath on the third stroke and a turn at the end, taught on Tuesday mornings at a municipal pool that smells of chlorine and floor cleaner and the inside of a swimming bag, by a woman called Pat who has taught half the town and does not raise her voice.

And Bernie can swim now. That is the thing you have to understand for this to land. She can genuinely swim. Four lengths without stopping, which for a woman who could not put her face in the water eighteen months ago is not a small item.

Except she stops.

Halfway down the third length, every single time, she drops a foot and finds the bottom.

It takes about a second and a half. Toes down, tiles there, up again, carry on. And she has told herself it is nothing, it is a rhythm thing, it is just something she does, and she was fine with it until Pat walked along the side one morning with her whistle in her hand and said, quite gently, over the noise:

"Bernie. Why did you stop just then?"

And Bernie, treading water in the middle of a lane with her goggles pushed up, said: "To check."

"Check what, love?"

"That I can still touch."

Pat crouched down at the edge, which is a thing she does when she is about to say the actual thing. "You have swum four lengths a week for six months. You do not need to touch. You keep interrupting yourself to find out whether you can do the thing you are doing while you are doing it."

Then she said the sentence.

"You are not checking the pool. You are checking Bernie. And Bernie keeps passing, and you keep not believing the result."

Now you are not in a swimming pool. You are in a good Tuesday. Nothing is wrong. The morning went fine, somebody was kind to you in a shop, the sun did that thing on the kitchen wall, and about eleven o'clock you noticed that you were happy.

And you stopped.

You put a foot down. You went looking for the bottom. Is everything all right between me and God, actually, right now, this second. And you got a reading you did not entirely trust, so you did it again after lunch.

I want to tell you what is actually happening there, and then I want to hand you the sentence that gets a woman across a pool.

Peace was made before you started checking

Paul says something in Romans that reads like a shrug until you notice the tense.

Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.Romans 5:1

Having been justified. Done. Concluded. A completed act sitting behind you in the past like a signature on a page.

We have peace with God. Not we are pursuing peace. Not we are hoping it holds. Have. Present tense possession of a settled condition, and notice what it is peace with. Not peace in your chest. Peace with God, which is a relationship word and not a mood word, and the difference between those two is the whole of your Tuesday.

So hear it, and let it be said over you rather than at you. You have peace with God right now, at eleven o'clock, in the middle of an ordinary good morning, and it did not dip when you stopped enjoying it to check on it. I am not offering you my opinion of your spiritual state. I am reading you what God put in writing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a written thing down into a person until their shoulders come off their ears.

Now here is the mechanic underneath the checking, because it deserves to be named and not just soothed.

Every time Bernie put her foot down, she got the same reassuring answer and she believed it for ninety seconds. Because the answer never came from the pool. It came from her own examination, and an examination cannot certify itself. It can only be repeated.

That is why you can have a good devotional Tuesday and be back at the deep end by Thursday. You are asking a question that your own interior is not qualified to answer, and the more often you ask it the more authority you hand to the asking.

Peace with God is not a reading you take. It is a status He conferred.

And it was conferred while you were not looking, which is the part your conscience finds hardest, because it means the most important thing about you was settled without your supervision. Scripture says it was done while we were still enemies, and if it was not waiting on your cooperation then, it is certainly not waiting on your self-audit now. That is written down, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a written status feel like solid tile under a foot.

You are swimming. That is the plain fact of it. You have been swimming for years. The evidence is not in the reading you took at eleven; it is in the fact that you were happy at all, that you noticed the sun on the wall, that you wanted this to be right between you and Him badly enough to be reading a page like this one.

Nobody who is out of fellowship with God is this bothered about being in it.

There was a man in a monastery five hundred years ago who put his foot down more times a day than anybody in that house, and his teacher eventually told him to stop looking inward for a verdict and look outward at Christ instead. It was not a technique. It was a change of direction. He spent the rest of his life pointing at a Person instead of at his own pulse, and half of Europe found out it could breathe.

You do not need a better checking method. You need to stop treating a settled thing as an open question.