He Said He Would Not Leave

She has said it to five people that she can count, and she meant it every time, and two of them have told her since that it was the thing that got them through.

He will never leave you nor forsake you.

She said it to a woman in a corridor whose husband had walked out. She said it to a girl of nineteen the night before a hearing. She said it, and it went in, and she watched it go in, and she is not a fraud and it was not a performance.

She is forty-nine. She has had the same worn Bible since her twenties and that verse is one of about six she has underlined twice.

And in her own chest, it is words. It has been words for about two and a half years now. She can say it. She can explain it. She can trace it back to Deuteronomy and tell you about the emphatic negatives in the Greek, because she went and looked that up in a bad month hoping the grammar would do what the sentence would not.

Nothing.

And here is where it has gone, and this is the part that keeps her up. She has stopped worrying about the dry patch. She has started worrying that she can hold a promise from God in both hands and feel absolutely nothing, and that this must indicate something in her that is broken at a level she cannot get at.

Look at where Hebrews puts the weight

Let me put the verse in front of you the way the writer of Hebrews actually frames it, because the framing is the part you have never noticed and it is the whole answer.

for he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.Hebrews 13:5

For He hath said.

The reason given is not that you feel it. The reason given is not that it resonates or that it comforts or that it strikes you as true. The reason given is that the sentence was spoken by God, in the past, and has never been withdrawn.

The force of it sits entirely in the fact of His having said it. Nothing about its operation runs through your chest.

You are held by a promise whose whole weight rests on His having spoken it. That is not me finding a technicality to get you out of trouble; Hebrews 13:5 gives the reason as He hath said and gives no other, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a first-century argument and stands it beside a woman with a twice-underlined verse and nothing happening.

What a promise is for

Now let me get at the fear underneath, because it is a good fear and it deserves a real answer rather than reassurance.

You are afraid that a person who feels nothing when God speaks has something broken in them at a level below repair.

Think about what a promise is actually for. Nobody gives a promise for the good days. You do not promise somebody you will not leave when everything is fine; the sentence is worth nothing there. A promise is issued precisely for the stretch where the person cannot feel that it is true, because that is the only stretch in which a promise does any work at all.

Which means the condition you are in is not the failure of the promise. It is the situation the promise was manufactured for.

You are standing in the exact conditions a promise exists to cover. The written word gives it as something already said rather than something to be felt, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a spoken sentence in force in a chest where nothing is registering.

And let me say the plain thing about the two and a half years. Dry feeling is not sin. It is not a defect in your believing apparatus, and it is not a sign that something is broken below the reach of help. A woman who goes and reads about emphatic negatives in a bad month hoping the grammar will do it is not a woman whose faith has failed. She is a woman still reaching, in the dark, with both hands.

You have never once stopped reaching, and God has not confused a numb chest with a departure. Scripture puts the not-leaving in His mouth and the receiving nowhere near your emotions, and the Holy Spirit is not standing over a forty-nine-year-old assessing what she felt when she read it.