The One Line You Can Still Get Out

Ten past six in the morning and the windshield is going from white to clear in a slow arc, so he drives the first half mile leaning forward like an old man to see through the part that has cleared.

Travel mug wedged in the door. Wipers on intermittent. The heater roaring on a setting that is either too much or nothing at all.

He has driven this road for nineteen years. He could do it with his hands off the wheel, which he does not, but he could. The junction by the tire place. The long straight past the reservoir where the water comes right up to the fence and the heron stands in the shallow end at the near corner every single morning of the world, one leg, absolutely still, like it is being paid to be there.

He used to sing this road. All of it, every morning, at volume, with the radio off because the radio got in the way.

He knew everything. That is not a boast, it is just what happens to a man who spent thirty years in rooms where people sang: he had hundreds of them in him, all the verses, the ones nobody bothers with, the fourth verse that gets skipped, the descant on the last time through. He could start anywhere and it would come.

Then some years happened. They do not need describing here and they are not really the point. What matters is what is happening this morning on the straight past the reservoir.

He opens his mouth.

And one line comes out.

"I need Thee every hour."

That is it. That is the whole of it. Behind that line, where the rest of the song used to be, there is nothing at all, not a blank he could fill in with effort but an actual wall, and he has stopped trying to get over it because trying makes it worse.

So he sings the one line again.

And again. And again, past the fence, past the heron who does not look up, all the way to the traffic signal by the industrial estate, nine or ten times, the same five words going round like a man who has forgotten how to talk.

And he is ashamed of it.

That is the part he has never told anybody. Not sad about it. Ashamed. Because a man who once had a hymnbook in his chest and now has one line on repeat in a cold van at ten past six is a man who has clearly lost something, and every time the line comes out of his mouth it sounds to him like proof.

He pulls into the depot at twenty-five past. He sits for a second with the engine off, and the ticking of it cooling, and the frost going on the glass again at the edges.

Then he goes in and puts the kettle on for everybody, the way he always does.

What the one line is actually doing

Come and sit with this a moment, because I think it has been misread for years.

For years you heard that line as a fragment. As the last surviving piece of a song, the corner of a photograph, evidence of the size of the fire by the size of the ash.

It is not a fragment. Listen to it on its own, with nothing before it and nothing after it.

I need Thee every hour.

That is a complete sentence. It has a subject, and an object, and a frequency, and every word of it is true, and it is addressed to a Person who is listening. It is not the leftovers of a prayer. It is a prayer, whole, finished, doing its work at ten past six in a cold van.

And here is the thing I most want you to see this morning, because it is the whole hinge of it. Look at what that line does to a drive. Psalm 16:8 says: I have set the LORD always before me: because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. Set before me. That is the mechanic, that is the whole engineering of the thing, and a line repeated ten times between a reservoir and a traffic signal is exactly and precisely that being done. You are doing the thing the psalm describes. You have been doing it every morning for years while calling it a symptom, and the Holy Spirit has been in that van with you honoring what His own word laid out.

I have set the LORD always before me: because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.Psalm 16:8

Now hear me on something, because you deserve straightness and not comfort.

I am not going to tell you that the other verses come back. I do not know that. Nobody who does not know a thing has any business promising it, and I have watched what it does to a person when somebody stands over them and guarantees a restoration on God's behalf, and then the calendar goes by. So no. This message makes no promise about the size of anything next year.

What I am telling you is what you have got, which is a different subject and a better one.

You have a true sentence addressed to God that comes out of you without effort every single morning. That is not a remnant. Scripture calls Him the God of all comfort and says His strength is made perfect in weakness, and it is His Spirit and not the length of your repertoire that carries a man into a depot yard with the Lord set in front of him.

And notice one more thing about that line, since we are being accurate. The line you kept is not a random survivor. Out of hundreds, out of the great swelling ones and the clever ones and the ones with four verses, the one that stayed in your mouth is the one that says you cannot do this without Him. That is not the wreckage of your faith. That is the load bearing beam, and it stayed because it was carrying.

Smaller is not the same as failing. A thing can lose height and keep every ounce of its strength, and the word says the foundation of God stands sure, and it does not say the building on top of it has to be the same size it was in 1998. You are standing on the foundation. That is already true of you this morning, and the same Spirit who set that line in your mouth has never once let go of it.