Why Call Ye Me Lord and Do Not

She prays every morning and she means it.

Not a routine she endures. She likes it. She has done it since her twenties, and the warmth in it is real, and she uses the word Lord in her prayers without thinking, the way you use a name you are fond of.

There is one thing.

About three years ago something came to her, unmistakably, with the sort of clarity she has had perhaps five times in her life. It concerned a person, and a specific action, and it was not ambiguous, and she knew immediately what it meant and roughly what it would cost.

And she did what a competent adult does with something inconvenient and clear. She filed it.

Not refused. Filed. Under later, which is a category she has kept adding to ever since with sub-headings about timing, and readiness, and waiting for a natural opening.

Here is the sentence she has never said out loud.

She has been talking to Him every morning for three years about everything except the one thing He was most obviously talking to her about.

Read the question He asks

There is a question in Luke that is put as a genuine question rather than as an accusation, and the difference matters.

And why call ye me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?Luke 6:46

Why call ye me Lord, Lord.

He is not calling them liars. The doubling of the word is the language of people who mean it, and He does not dispute that they mean it. He asks how the two things are sitting alongside each other, which is a question a person can actually answer.

And He asks it of people who were following Him around. Not of enemies. Not of the crowd at a distance. He asks it of the ones who had come out to hear, which is to say, of people exactly like the woman who prays warmly every morning at half past six.

Your calling Him Lord is real rather than false, and Luke 6:46 puts a question to sincere people rather than an indictment. That is what the word actually does, not softening I am adding, and the Holy Spirit is the One who asks it in a way a woman can answer without collapsing.

Filing is not refusing, and it is not obeying

Now the plain thing, and it needs both halves.

You did not refuse. I want that said, because if you had refused you would have known where you stood, and part of what has made these three years wearing is that not once in all of them was there a moment where you decided against it.

But filing is not neutral. A thing in a drawer is a thing that is not happening, and three years of not happening is the same outcome as a decision you never made, arrived at by a route that let you avoid making it.

That is not fraud. It is how ordinary decent people handle a cost they do not know how to pay.

And nothing about the three years has ever cost you your standing with Him. Scripture puts a question to you rather than a sentence, and the Holy Spirit is not turning away from a woman who prays every morning with something in a drawer.

Take it out and put a date on it

Here is the practical piece, and it is deliberately not the whole thing.

Take it out of the drawer. Then put a date on it.

Not do it today. That is not what I am asking, and if I asked it you would agree warmly and file this article next to the thing. Take it out, look at it in daylight, say out loud what it is, and write a date.

A date is what turns later into a thing that exists. Later has no date by definition, and that is its entire function, and it is why it has held for three years in the life of a woman who is otherwise thoroughly reliable.

And if the honest date is eight weeks away because of something real, then the date is eight weeks away. A real date is not a delay. It is the opposite of one.

You are able to bring this out into the light today, and naming a day is the whole of what is asked this week. Luke 6:46 asks why call ye me Lord and do not, and the Holy Spirit is the One who steadies a woman opening a drawer she has kept shut for three years.