Name One Thing It Hands You

Sasha asked it on a Wednesday morning, standing at the counter with her coat still on, in the voice of somebody genuinely curious rather than somebody making a point.

"So what do you get?"

Delia laughed and said what do you mean, and Sasha said what she meant, which was this. She had been listening to Delia for a couple of years. She had watched her go to things on Tuesday nights and come back different. She had heard her explain what she believed, twice, patiently, and Sasha had understood it both times and had not been persuaded and had not stopped being interested either.

"I know what you believe," Sasha said. "I've got that part. I'm asking what it hands you. Like, this morning. Name one."

And Delia opened her mouth.

She started to say something about heaven, and heard it land as a thing about later, and stopped. She started again with a sentence about knowing God, and heard it land as a description of an activity rather than an answer, and stopped again.

Four years. Four years of believing every word of it. She could have taken the whole thing apart on the counter and put it back together for a stranger. She could not name one thing it had put in her hands.

"That is such a weird answer," Sasha said, laughing, and Delia laughed too, out of pure appalled honesty, because it was.

She was not doubting. That is the part worth noticing. There was no crack in what she believed. It was more like owning a house you have never gone into a single room of, and being asked at the door what is in there, and finding that you genuinely do not know.

And that is you, or it has been. You could explain it to somebody. You believe it, properly, on the hard days as well. And if a friend put a mug down on your counter and asked you to name one thing it actually hands you this morning, before lunch, in your real life, you would say heaven and hear how it sounded.

Nothing here is still pending

Start with a verb, because the whole answer is hiding in a tense.

In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will.Ephesians 1:11

Obtained. Past. Done. Not shortlisted for, not in line for, not promised at some later date on satisfactory completion. The sentence is written about people who were, at the time it was written, sitting in ordinary rooms in a port city having an ordinary week.

You have obtained something rather than applied for it. That is not a warm reading, it is the tense Ephesians 1:11 uses, and the Holy Spirit is why a completed verb written to a church in Asia Minor arrives at a counter on a Wednesday with your name on the envelope.

Now, what is in it. And here I have to say plainly what this is not, because this category is where a certain kind of teaching goes badly wrong. Nothing on this page is a forecast about your circumstances. I am not going to tell you what is coming, or what will improve, or what is about to change in your house. What is named here is what Scripture names, and Scripture is not shy about it.

He says what the portion is, and it is not a thing

The clearest sentence in the Bible about an inheritance is one God says about Himself, and He says it to a man He deliberately gave no land to.

I am your portion and your inheritance among the people of Israel.Numbers 18:20

Every other tribe got acreage. Aaron's did not, on purpose, and God gives the reason in the same breath: because I am. The absence was not an oversight to be corrected later. It was the shape of the gift.

You have God Himself as the portion, and that is the answer to Sasha's question. Numbers 18:20 is where He said it, and the Spirit who lives in a believer is the standing proof that the arrangement is not theoretical: the thing handed over is not a category of blessing, it is the Person.

And then there are the things He hands over out of that, and every one of them is nameable. Peace, which Jesus said He was leaving behind Him personally rather than describing in general.

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you.John 14:27

You have peace given to you by name, in the first person, by the one who was about to walk into the worst night in history. That is John 14:27, and it is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one making a two thousand year old handover current in a kitchen this morning.

There is more, and it is all like that. Access, so that a person walks in rather than waits at a desk. Adoption, so that the word Father is not a figure of speech. A place among people. None of that is a prediction. All of it is present.

And your side, which is not a summary of the above

Here is the sentence this site is built to say, and it sits in the middle of the teaching rather than at the end where a disclaimer goes. What God bound Himself to is settled and holds without you. Your response is real, and it is asked, and it goes on being asked. It is simply not the half that keeps the inheritance yours.

But notice what your response actually is here, because it is not effort. It is taking hold. A thing can be genuinely yours and never once used, which is exactly the four years Delia spent with a house she never walked into, and nobody was withholding a key from her. She had never named a room.

Right now, as you read, you are the person Ephesians 1:11 was written about, holding something you have never once said out loud. The Holy Spirit is not waiting for you to qualify. He is waiting at the door of a room in a house that has your name on the deed, and He has been perfectly patient about it.