He Did Not Raise His Voice In the Street

It is a phrase he cannot get out of his head and it was said in a good spirit at a men's breakfast.

You need to get some fire in you, brother.

He was fifty-one at the time and he had been walking with God since he was twenty-six, and he laughed, because that is what you do, and he has thought about it most weeks since.

What followed was two years of a project. He does not call it that. But he made himself say things in the prayer meeting. He put his hands up in a service and felt like a man in a costume for the whole song. He tried to bring God into conversations at work in a way that was not his and that the other person could feel was not his, and it landed badly twice and he has not tried it since.

He is fifty-three. He is a quiet man. He was a quiet child and he is a quiet husband, and he has been steady with God for twenty-seven years in a way that has never once looked like anything.

And what he has come to believe, in the two years since the breakfast, is that his temperament is a spiritual problem. That there is a version of a Christian man he was supposed to become, and that he has failed to become it, and that the quietness is not a way of being made but a fault he has not addressed.

What Isaiah says about how He carried it

There is a prophecy about the Messiah, and it describes His manner rather than His mission, which is unusual and is why it is worth your time.

He shall not cry, nor lift up, nor cause his voice to be heard in the street.Isaiah 42:2

He shall not cry, nor lift up, nor cause his voice to be heard in the street.

Read that as a description of a temperament and it is startling. The one carrying the most important thing anybody has ever carried is described in advance as a man who does not raise His voice in public.

And this is not a passage about weakness. The verses either side are enormous. He brings forth judgment to the nations, He does not fail nor is discouraged, the isles wait for His law. The manner and the magnitude sit in the same paragraph and neither one qualifies the other.

You are made in a register that Scripture uses to describe the Messiah's own manner. That is not me finding a proof text for your personality; Isaiah 42:2 puts the not raising of the voice into the portrait deliberately, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and lays it beside a man who has spent two years in a costume.

What this does not license

Now let me guard it, because there is a bad version of this and quiet men reach for it constantly.

This does not make loud a defect. It is not a passage that runs the other way. The same Christ cleared a temple, and wept out loud, and cried with a loud voice at a tomb, and shouted from a cross. If Isaiah 42:2 proved that noise is unspiritual, it would prove it against Him first.

So put the whole sorting exercise down, in both directions. The man at the breakfast was wrong to reach for it about you. You would be wrong to reach for it about him.

You are not the better kind and he is not, and no such ranking has ever been issued. The written word describes the Messiah's own manner as quiet without ever making quiet the standard, and the Holy Spirit does not distribute Himself according to volume.

And now the sentence that has actually been doing the damage, which is not the one from the breakfast. It is the one you built afterward: my temperament is a spiritual problem. Everything since has followed from that. Two years of trying to become a man you are not, in front of a God who made the man you are, and the exhaustion of that is most of the coldness you have been blaming on yourself.

You are not a defective version of a louder man, and there has never been a form you were supposed to arrive at. Scripture puts the quiet manner in the portrait of Christ Himself, and the Holy Spirit has kept a man steady for twenty-seven years in a register nobody has ever noticed.