Conclusion: Come With What You Have

John 17:3. Eternal life is knowing the Father and the Son — present tense, this day, in whatever condition you are actually in today.

You do not need to have arrived at certainty before you qualify for the knowing. You do not need to feel the anchor to be held by it. The anchor is set in a place that your feelings do not govern and your circumstances cannot reach — inside behind the curtain, where the Son who went ahead of you as your forerunner holds what cannot be taken from Him.

The Catechism's last clause is the ground: never left without such a presence and support of the Spirit of God as keeps them from sinking into utter despair.

Never left. The Spirit does not depart in the dark season. He keeps the connection when the connection cannot be felt. He maintains the branch in the Vine. He pours the love of God (Romans 5:5) into the interior of the person who cannot feel it arriving. He holds the person on the edge of despair at the edge — not by manufacturing warmth they do not have, but by being present with a presence that does not depend on being felt.

If you came in today with the question nobody says out loud — am I still His, is He still there, how do I know? — I want to leave you with two things.

The first is Hebrews 6:19: we have this hope as an anchor for the soul, sure and steadfast, which reaches inside behind the curtain. The anchor is sure. The anchor is steadfast. Not because your grip is sure and steadfast. Because the anchor is set where your grip is not the governing variable.

The second is the invitation that is always open. Come with what you have. Bring the ruins if the ruins are what you have. Bring the dry prayer. Bring the accusation, the way Asaph did, addressed to the God you are accusing of silence — because the addressing itself is the knowing, however thin the knowing feels. The God who received Asaph's lament and put it in the canon will receive yours.

The anchor holds now.

It will hold tonight between midnight and four.

It held for Abraham across twenty-five years.

It held for Asaph in the smoke of the sanctuary.

It holds for you.

Soli Deo Gloria.