hitting the fan

chapter one

the list that isn’t there

I am going to say the boldest thing in this whole booklet right now, on the first page of the first chapter, so that everything after it has to answer to it. Here it is. You cannot prove from the Bible that saying a coarse word is, all by itself, a sin.

You cannot. I have looked. Better people than I have looked, for a great deal longer. It is not there. There is no list. God never handed down a column of forbidden syllables, never said here are the words, do not let these particular sounds cross your lips. And think about it: if He had, we would have it. It would be printed in every Bible in every language, identical, and every new believer would sit down and memorize it like a spelling test the first week.

There is no list. God never handed down a column of forbidden syllables.

Now sit with how strange that absence is, given the weight we hang on it. We have made a clean vocabulary into one of the very first marks of a Christian, one of the first things we tell a new believer to tidy up, one of the fastest ways we size up whether a stranger is walking with the Lord. And the God who wrote down, in plain words, what He thinks about murder and adultery and theft and idolatry and gossip and pride, the God who was never once shy about naming a sin, somehow forgot to give us the list of bad words we spend so much energy enforcing on His behalf. He did not forget. It was never His list.

Hear me carefully, though, because my point is narrow and I want it to stay narrow. I am not saying words do not matter. They matter enormously, and the second half of this booklet is going to lean on you about that harder than you may enjoy. I am not saying there is no such thing as a sinful mouth. There is a great deal of sinful mouth in this world, and the Bible has plenty to say about it. My point is smaller and sharper than either of those. It is only this: the sin is never in the word itself, in the bare sound of it. Go hunting through Scripture for a list of forbidden words to prove me wrong, and you will come back with empty hands. And that ought to unsettle you a little more than it does.

Because look what follows. If God did not write the list, somebody else did. And if somebody else wrote it, we had better find out who, and on whose authority, before we spend one more day binding it on every conscience in the church and quietly grading each other’s holiness by it. So that is our errand. Let us go find out whose list this actually is.

chapter two

sin and the effects of sin

Before we take another step I have to put a tool in your hand, because without it half of what comes next will slide right off you. It is a distinction the old saints knew well and we have mostly misplaced, and once you are holding it you will find you reach for it every single day. It is the difference between sin and the effects of sin. They are not the same thing. And the confusing of the two has heaped up more needless guilt, and started more needless fights, than almost anything I know.

Let me make it plain with something you cannot argue your way out of. Your body is getting older. It is slowing down, wearing out, wrinkling, forgetting where you set the keys, and one of these days it is going to quit on you altogether. Now. Is that a sin? Of course it is not. You did nothing wrong by turning fifty. There is no repenting your way out of a gray hair; you can weep at the mirror all night and wake up grayer. And yet a body that ages and dies is not the way God first made it, either. Death came in through the Fall and dragged decay in behind it. So your aging body is not a sin. It is an effect of sin. It is what a broken world does to an innocent person, through no fault of his own at all.

There it is in a single verse. Sin came in, death followed it through the door, and the whole creation has been groaning under the weight ever since. But mark the two piles, because they are genuinely different piles. On the one side, sin: moral, a thing you do, carrying guilt, calling for repentance. On the other side, the effect of sin: a condition you simply live inside, carrying no guilt at all, which you never chose and cannot repent of, because there is nothing there to repent of. You cannot say sorry for a sunset fading. It was not yours to cause.

Now hold that up against human speech, because that is exactly where we are headed. When two people talk, all kinds of things go wrong that are nobody’s sin. Meaning leaks out between one heart and the other. Tone falls off along the way. A thing said tenderly lands like a slap. A thing meant as nothing on this earth gets heard as a jab to the ribs. Two people who genuinely love each other can wound each other clean through with a sentence that neither of them did a single thing wrong to say.

Two people who love each other can wound each other with a sentence neither did wrong to say.

That is not sin. That is the effect of sin. It is two cracked vessels trying to pour meaning across the broken air between them and losing some in the pouring, the very same way the brokenness shows up in your knees when you stand and your eyes when you read small print. Now, do not hear me wrong, sin can absolutely get into our speech, and often does. When a man picks a word to draw blood, when he lies, when he tears somebody down on purpose, that is sin, plain and guilty, and no amount of talk about the Fall will wash it off him. What sorts the one from the other is the heart behind it, the aim, the intent, and we will get there in due time. But drive this distinction in deep now, because the whole argument about words runs straight down it: a great many of the things we have solemnly called sins of the tongue are not sins at all. They are the effects of sin, the ordinary friction of broken people rubbing along together, and no more to be repented of than a gray hair.

chapter three

whose list is it, then?

So God did not write the list. Somebody did. And here is the quickest way to prove the list belongs to men and not to God: watch it change. What God says does not move. What men say moves all the time. And this list of ours has never once held still.

Look at what has actually happened to our forbidden words over the centuries, because it is documented and it is remarkable. For long stretches of history, the very worst thing a person could say had nothing to do with the body at all. It was the oath. To swear by God’s blood, by His wounds, by His nails, that was the profanity that stopped a room cold and got a man in real trouble, because people believed such an oath reached clear up into heaven and tore at the body of Christ Himself. That was the heavy artillery. Meanwhile the body words, the very ones we now rank as unspeakable, were often just coarse, just rude, blunt but not truly shocking.¹

And then the whole thing flipped over. The oaths shrank into mild little exclamations nobody blinks at, and the body and the bed rose up to take the top of the list. What had been worst became mild. What had been mild became worst. The list turned completely inside out, and not because God revised His standard, but because society revised its taste. A thing that rearranges itself like that, across the centuries, following the jumpy nerves of each age, is not a law of God. It is a custom of men. Laws of God do not behave that way. Thou shalt not steal has never once traded places with anything.²

And if the centuries feel too far away, look at the decades right under your nose, because the list is drifting faster now than it ever has, and you can watch it happen at your own kitchen table. There are words my grandmother would have walked out of a room over that you will hear tonight on an ordinary broadcast. There are words that were perfectly polite in her day that will end a man’s career in ours, and rightly so in some cases, which only makes the point twice: the list moves, both directions, and it moves under our feet while we are standing on it.

It has even split down the middle by generation, and split over things that are not words at all. A young person reads a period at the end of a text as cold, clipped, a door shut in the face, where the older person who typed it only meant to end his sentence the way he was taught to end a sentence in school. A short reply that grandpa thinks is efficient, the grandchild reads as a slap. All capital letters. An hour of silence before a reply. A little cartoon face there or not there. A whole grammar of offense has grown up in twenty years, and half the people holding this booklet cannot even see it. Now think. If offense really lived inside the word, the way weight lives inside a stone, it could not do this. A stone does not get heavier because the fashion changed. It would hold still. The fact that offense will not hold still, that it slides across centuries and decades and now across the six feet between a father and his child in the same house, is about the plainest proof you could ask for that the offense was never in the word to begin with. We put it there. And what we put there, we can move. We do it constantly.³

chapter four

the name above every name

Now I have to slow down and be careful, because I have just spent three chapters insisting there is no list of forbidden words in the Bible, and I do not want you closing this booklet thinking the mouth is wide-open country with no fence anywhere. There is a fence. There is exactly one place where God spoke to our subject directly and drew a hard line, and here is the surprise: it is nothing like the thing we usually get worked up about. It is His name.

That is a commandment. Not a custom, not a fashion, not a thing that drifts with the age, but one of the ten words God wrote out with His own finger in stone. And look what it is about. Not a coarse word. His name, the holiest word there is, and taking it up in vain, which means emptily, carelessly, for nothing. To take a thing in vain is to lift it up and spend it on nothing, to pull out the most valuable word in the universe and toss it on the counter like loose change for a soda.

And here is the irony, and I want it to cut, because it is sharp enough to. The one kind of speech God forbade with an actual commandment is the exact one the church waves right on through. We clutch our pearls over the body words, the words that appear on nobody’s tablet of stone, and then in the very same breath, without a flicker of conscience, out it comes: oh my G--, oh my L--. We take the name of the Lord, we take the name of Jesus Christ, and we throw it out as a little sound of surprise when the milk spills. Careless. Empty. In vain. The precise thing the commandment names. We built a tall fence around the words God never fenced, and knocked flat the one fence He actually put up.

We built a fence around the words God never fenced, and knocked flat the one He did.

Now hear me, I am not trying to hang a new scruple on you so you flinch every time you stub your toe in the dark. I am trying to show you how upside-down our instincts have gotten. The same believer who would sooner bite his tongue off than say one of the four-letter words will call on the name of God a dozen times before lunch as a verbal shrug and never once feel it as a sin, when it is the one piece of speech in this whole discussion that a plain commandment actually touches. If we are going to guard our mouths, and we should, let us at least guard the thing God told us to guard. The name is holy. Hallowed be thy name, He taught us to pray, the very first thing out of the gate, before daily bread, before forgiveness, before anything. We might start by meaning it when we say it.

chapter five

words the bible itself uses

Let us walk right up to a couple of the words on the list, the actual words, because I have come to think a good deal of their power over us is simply that we have never once looked at them in the daylight. We treat them like something radioactive, as though studying them for a minute would leave a mark. But a thing you are afraid to look straight at has a hold on you it never earned. So let us look.

Start with the word we spell d--n. What does it actually mean? It means to condemn, to hand over to judgment, to declare a thing under the sentence of God. That is not a naughty little meaning. That is one of the weightiest acts in all of Scripture, and the Bible performs it, in that very word, again and again. The Lord Jesus said, in plain words, that he that believeth not shall be damned. Paul wrote that those who resist God’s ordinance shall receive to themselves damnation. The word is sitting in your King James Bible right now, in its proper sense, on the lips of Christ, because it names a real and dreadful thing that is really going to happen to some souls. So the word cannot be the problem. If it were, your own Bible would be full of profanity. The only thing that could ever make saying it a sin is the heart behind it: are you calling down a real and terrible judgment carelessly, emptily, on your neighbor’s flat tire? Then yes, there is a sin there, but the sin is the carelessness and the spite, and it would be every bit as much a sin dressed in a clean word. The letters are innocent. The heart is the thing standing trial.⁴

The letters are innocent. The heart is the thing standing trial.

Now take h--l. Same lesson, only stronger, because hell is not even a coarse word to begin with. It is the name of a place. A real place. The place the Lord Jesus warned about more than anyone else in the whole Bible, more than all the prophets put together. He spoke of it plainly and often, the fire not quenched, the outer darkness, the weeping, and He did it because He loved people and could not bear for them to go there. The word is a road sign pointing at the most serious reality a human being will ever meet. When a man uses it as a mild little curse, says a thing is hot as h--l, tells somebody to go there, the trouble is not that the word is dirty, because it is not dirty. If there is a sin, it is that he is treating a real and unspeakable destination like a throwaway, or actually wishing a soul into eternal ruin, and there again, watch it, the sin has walked clean out of the word and into the heart, which is where it was living the whole time.

Are you seeing the pattern yet? Twice now we have picked a word up off the forbidden list, turned it over in the light, and twice the badness has refused to stay put in the word. It keeps sliding off the letters and onto the aim, onto the meaning, onto the heart of the one doing the talking. Keep hold of that, because we are about to reach for the worst word of all, the one that sits at the very top of the list, the one this whole booklet is named around. And I want you to watch it do the exact same thing.

chapter six

the worst word, and why it isn’t what you think

Here we are, then. The word at the head of the list. The one nobody prints. The one this booklet’s title tiptoes around on purpose. And I am going to do a thing that may make you shift in your chair, which is talk about it plainly, one grown believer to another, because I have become convinced that the honest look in broad daylight is the very thing that breaks its spell.

First, let us kill a myth, because it is a favorite and it is nonsense. You have heard, probably more than once, that the word is an acronym, that it stood for some phrase about the king’s permission, or an unlawful carnal charge, and that it got stamped on stocks or arrest papers back in the mists of time. None of it is true. Not one word. Word-origins of that acronym kind barely exist at all before the twentieth century, and the little thread that unravels the whole sweater is the word for sitting at the front of the supposed phrase, which no real placard or charge sheet on earth would have wasted the ink on. The truth is far more ordinary and far less exciting. It is an old, blunt word of the Germanic family, cousin to plain everyday words in Dutch and German and the old Scandinavian tongues, and its ancient sense was something like to strike, or to move back and forth. That is the whole pedigree. It is a farmyard word, earthy and old, and it has plodded along in the language for centuries doing perfectly ordinary work.⁵

Now here is the part I really want you to sit still for. Think about how that word actually gets used today, out in the street, by the people who use it most. Nine times in ten it means nothing. Nothing at all. It has no content left in it. It is a grunt, an intensifier, a bit of noise a man drops in front of another word to signal that he feels strongly about something, and the person listening pulls exactly zero literal meaning out of it. A man mashes his thumb with a hammer and yells it, and he is not proposing anything, not making a claim about anybody, not describing an act. He is making a noise of pain, the way a dog yelps. The word has been worn as smooth and empty as a river stone that a thousand years of water ran over. Whatever freight it once carried fell off it a long way back.

It has been worn as smooth and empty as a river stone.

So look hard at what we have actually done. We took a word that in plain daily use means essentially nothing, an empty grunt, and we crowned it the single worst word in the language, the one that must never be spoken, the one that gets a show yanked off the air and a man shown the door. And meanwhile, a step away, we let words that carry real and dreadful meaning, the very name of God among them, walk past without a second glance. Sit in that gap for a moment, because it tells the whole story. The severity of the ranking and the emptiness of the meaning have come completely unhooked from one another. The most forbidden word turns out to be one of the least meaningful, and one of the most meaningful words there is, the divine name, gets treated as one of the least forbidden. That is not how a holy God weighs words, by how much truth or blasphemy they actually carry. That is how a social taboo weighs words, by fashion, by nerve, by the mood of the age. And a social taboo, however fierce, is not a sin to break. It might be unwise to break it, and we will get to exactly why. But it is not in itself a sin, for the simplest reason in the world: God never put the word on any list, and the word itself, dragged out into the light and looked at, turns out to mean almost nothing at all.⁶

chapter seven

it’s not the word, it’s the direction

Here is the hinge the whole booklet has been swinging toward, and if you forget everything else in these pages, keep this one thing. Sin in speech does not come in at the vocabulary. It comes in at the aim. It is not the word. It is the direction you fire it.

Let me show you, as plainly as I can, both directions at once. First: take a word on nobody’s forbidden list, a spotless word, and aim it at a wounded person to cut them, and you have sinned. Call a grieving man a fool to his face. Tell a woman who just buried her child that it was probably her own fault. Not one forbidden syllable in either sentence. Both of them are wicked, straight through, because both were fired at a soul made in the image of God with the intent to wound. There is your sin of the tongue, and notice, it did not need a single dirty word to do its work. It never does.

Not one forbidden syllable. Both were wicked, because both were fired to wound.

Now turn it around. Take the very worst word on the list, the one from the last chapter, and let a man bark it out because he just slammed his hand in the car door, alone, in a closed garage, not another living soul within a mile. Whom did he wound? Nobody. What image-bearer did he assault? None. He made a noise of pain in an empty room. I am not going to stand here in front of you and call that noise a sin, because I cannot find the victim and I cannot find the commandment, and sin needs at least one of the two to exist. Unbecoming, maybe. A little undignified, sure. But wickedness? There is no one on the other end of it.

Think of it the way you would think of any word that does more than one job. The hard word for a female dog is simply the word for a female dog when a breeder writes it on a pedigree; it is a plain technical term, clean as a whistle, and nobody in the room so much as blinks. That very same word turns into an ugly sin the instant it is hurled at a woman to shame her, and the letters did not change, not one of them. The direction changed. The word stood perfectly still and the aim swung around, and the aim is where the sin was sitting the whole time. This is the master key to the entire subject, so let me hand it to you straight: the word is a knife. A knife lying on the table is not a sin. A knife in the surgeon’s hand is a mercy that saves a life. The very same knife in an angry fist, driven at your brother, is attempted murder. And the difference, every time, in every case, was never once in the steel. It was in the hand, and the heart running the hand.⁷

chapter eight

what the bible actually says about the mouth

Now, somebody has been sitting there this whole time with his hand up, waiting to stop me, and I want to give him the floor, because he has verses, and they are good verses, and we are going to look at every one of them together. Does the Bible not say, he asks, that we are to put away filthy communication? Does it not forbid corrupt speech and foul talk in so many words? It does. It says exactly that, and I believe every syllable of it. So let us open those very passages, the ones people wave at me when I say what I have been saying, and find out what they actually forbid. Because I promise you, it is not a list of words. It is something much bigger than a list, and a great deal harder to hide from behind a clean mouth.

Now here is the thing that ought to settle the whole matter, and hardly anyone in the pew has ever been told it. The word Paul reaches for, the word we translate corrupt, is a word that means rotten. Putrid. Spoiled, gone off, turned. It is the very same word the Lord Jesus used for the bad tree that brings forth bad fruit, and the same word the fishermen used for the rotten fish they flung back out of the net. It is a word about decay. So look at what Paul is actually doing. He is not handing you a vocabulary list. He is telling you what kind of speech to keep out of your mouth by describing what it does: it is rotten, it stinks, it spreads, it spoils whatever it touches, like one bad apple in the barrel. And then, in the same breath, he hands you the test that replaces the list entirely. Does it build up, or tear down? Does it hand grace to the person who hears it, or does it rot him a little on the way past? That is the whole standard. Not which words. What the words do.⁸

Not which words. What the words do.

Go to the other passages and you find exactly the same thing, every time. When Paul writes to the Colossians about filthy communication, when he warns about foolish talking and coarse jesting, he is never once cataloging syllables; he is describing a character of speech, a rottenness, a fruit. And the Lord Himself put His finger on the root of all of it when He said that it is not what goes into a man that defiles him but what comes out, and that what comes out of the mouth comes up from the heart, so that the mouth is only ever a bucket drawing up whatever is down in the well.⁹

So let me ask you the question these verses are really asking, and I warn you, it is a far more uncomfortable question than which words are on the list. What is the real filthy communication? What is the truly rotten speech, the kind that stinks and spreads and tears people down and pours poison where grace was supposed to go? I will tell you, and I promise you there is not a single coarse word in the whole lot of it. It is gossip, which takes a reputation apart with a warm smile and a lowered voice. It is slander, which is just a lie in its Sunday clothes. It is flattery, which is a lie that wants something out of you. It is contempt, that little curl at the corner of the mouth that tells another human being, without a word, that he is beneath you. It is the cutting remark, delivered in perfectly clean vocabulary, timed perfectly, to do the most damage with the least fingerprints. That, my friend, is the rotten speech the Bible actually forbids. And here is the sting: a man can be absolutely fluent in every bit of it, a virtuoso, and never once let slip a word that would not pass in the fellowship hall on Sunday morning. Which means our little list has been standing at the door like a sleepy guard, checking vocabulary and waving the real filth straight through, so long as it came dressed properly and kept its voice down.

chapter nine

the gnat and the camel

I have to get pointed now, and I am going to trust that you can take it, because I think you can, and because the Lord Himself got pointed at exactly this spot and I would be a coward to go soft where He went hard. He looked at the most religious, most rule-keeping, most careful-about-the-externals people of His day, the ones who had the longest lists and kept them best, and He said a thing to them that ought to make every one of us who has ever felt superior about our clean mouth go cold.

Picture it, because He meant it to be almost funny, in a terrible way. A man so careful about his purity that he strains his drink through a cloth to catch a tiny gnat before it can pass his lips, and while he is squinting at the gnat he opens wide and swallows a camel, humps and hooves and all, and never notices it go down. That is the portrait of a person who has gotten the weights exactly backwards, who is scrupulous about the tiny thing and blind to the enormous one, and the Lord aimed it straight at the champions of the external rule.

Now let me hold that mirror up to the very thing this booklet is about, because it belongs there. Here is a believer who would be genuinely scandalized to hear a coarse word, who would mention it in his prayers that evening, who sizes up a stranger’s soul by whether such a word slips out. That is the gnat, and he is straining at it manfully. And meanwhile, watch him. Watch him turn his nose up at the person who is hurting and inconvenient. Watch him carry the choice piece of gossip to three people before lunch, softly, prayerfully, as a request for prayer. Watch the little degrading smile he gives the person he considers beneath him. Watch the contempt he has carried in his chest for his brother for eleven years and calls discernment. Watch him sit across from someone falling apart and feel nothing, offer nothing, because he was never taught that the coldness in his own heart was a sin, only that certain words were. That is the camel, and it is going down whole, humps and hooves and all, and he does not feel a thing, because no flagged word was ever involved.

And I will tell you plainly what the little list really is, because I have watched it do its quiet work for years. It is a decoy. It is the cheap, visible, costless version of holiness that a man buys for himself so he never has to pay for the real thing. Keeping your mouth clean of six words costs you almost nothing at all; a mute man manages it perfectly, and he is not thereby a saint. But keeping your heart clean of contempt, keeping your tongue off the clean-worded cruelties, actually loving the tiresome, inconvenient person standing in front of you when you would rather he left, that costs you everything you have, and then it asks for more tomorrow. So the flesh, which is nothing if not shrewd, takes the bargain gladly. It polices the easy thing and lets the hard thing run wild, and then it points proudly at its clean mouth as the receipt for a holiness it never purchased, and it swallows the camel whole, humps and hooves, every single day of its life.

The list is a decoy: the cheap, costless holiness a man buys so he never pays for the real thing.

Come now, My Friend. I am going to talk to you the way an older sister talks to a brother she loves too much to flatter. You are a grown believer. You have the Spirit of the living God living inside you, the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead. It is well past time to quit straining gnats and go dig the camel out of your own throat. The words were never the point. The heart was always the point. And I think you have known that all along, down underneath somewhere, and been just a little afraid of it, because the words are so very much easier to manage than the heart is.

chapter ten

is it wise? is it edifying?

Now, maybe by this point you are worried I have thrown the door open too wide. If there is no list, and the sin is only ever down in the heart, then can a believer just say whatever he pleases so long as he means no harm by it, and go whistling through his day cheerfully coarse? Let me shut that door, and shut it firmly, because that is not where any of this has been heading. Here is the truth that will surprise you: when you take the little list away, you do not get a lower standard. You get a far higher one. Let me show you how much higher.

Paul had already fought this exact fight once, though his was over food and not words, with people who had just discovered their liberty and wanted to know how far the leash ran. His answer to them is the answer to our whole question. Listen.

Watch where he plants his feet. He does not take the liberty back. He says it flat out, twice, all things are lawful, and he does not sneak around behind himself and pretend there was a rule after all. He grants the freedom outright. And then he asks a question that goes far deeper than any rule ever could. Not, am I allowed? He just told you, you are. But, is it helpful? Does it build a single soul up? You see, the grown believer has quit asking the child’s question, how much can I get away with, and started asking the adult’s question, what does love actually want from me here, in this moment, with this person.

The question was never can I. It was always should I. And should-I has no floor.

So the question about your mouth was never can I. Of course you can. The question is should I, and should-I is a far harder master than can-I ever thought about being, because can-I has a floor you can stand on the moment you clear it, and should-I has no floor at all. It just keeps asking. Should I say this, to this person, right now? Will it build him or wear him down? Does it suit who I actually am, a child of the King with the name of Christ stitched onto me? And even when a thing is perfectly lawful, love may look at the person across the table and quietly set it down, not because saying it would have been a sin, but because love would sooner lay a liberty down than risk a brother over it. That is not a lower bar than the old list. It is a mountain next to a molehill. The list asked you to watch six words. Love asks you to watch your whole heart, in every sentence you speak, for the good of every soul who has to hear you. And nobody, nobody, clears that bar by managing a vocabulary. You only ever clear it by being changed from the inside.

So no, I am not handing you a license. A license is the child’s prize, a slip of paper that says do as you please. I am handing you liberty, which is a heavier and more grown-up thing to carry, because liberty is freedom with love for a governor, and love is a stricter governor than any list of forbidden words ever dreamed of being. You are free. Now go and become the kind of person whose free speech hands grace to everyone in earshot. That will take you the rest of your life, and it is the actual assignment.¹⁰

chapter eleven

in the world, not of it

There is a balance to strike here at the end, and I mean to strike it honestly, because I have spent this whole booklet swinging a hammer at the pearl-clutching reflex, and if I laid the hammer down right now you might think I had toppled clean over into the opposite ditch, which is every bit as deep and just as easy to tumble into.

So let me name the true thing the pearl-clutcher has hold of, because I have no intention of taking it from him. Our witness matters. How we come across to people matters, genuinely. The Bible really does tell us to give no needless offense, to season our speech, to live in such a way that the outsider looking on catches sight of something different in us and wonders about it. So the believer who goes out of his way to be coarse, who wears his liberty like a badge pinned to his chest and dares the room to be bothered by it, has missed the whole point just as badly as the pearl-clutcher did, only from the far side of the road. If your freedom has made you careless of the people around you, then whatever it was, it was never Christian freedom. It was just the same old flesh in a brand-new coat.

But the church has dug its own ditch, and it is the one I have spent these pages hauling you back from, and it deserves to be named plainly so you can see both walls at once. Somewhere back down the road a great many good believers decided that being not of the world meant being unable to do anything the world does, that holiness was mostly a matter of subtraction, of an ever-lengthening list of things we do not do, do not say, do not touch, do not watch, until the whole Christian life curdles into a kind of flinch, a permanent recoil from a world we have been trained to treat as though it were catching. That is not what the Lord prayed for you. Read His own words on the last night, and notice what He did not ask for.

He did not pray you out of the world. He prayed you kept in it, and not of it, which is a wholly different thing, and a harder and a far better one. So there are your two walls, and the road home runs right down the middle between them. On the one side stands the pearl-clutcher, who made a religion out of subtraction and mistook a clean vocabulary for a clean heart. On the other stands the man who took his liberty, propped it up as an idol, and forgot he was ever called to hand grace to a living soul. And straight down the center walks the grown believer, in the world and not of it, neither hugging it nor fleeing it, free as a bird and gentle as a lamb, his liberty in one hand and his love for people in the other, and he will not set down either one. That is where I have been trying to get you this whole time. Not to a shorter list. Not even to no list. Out of the list business altogether, and into the far better business of a heart so full of Christ that whatever comes up out of the well comes up clean, whatever words it happens to grab on the way up.