The Fact and the Contempt

The hardest ones are the ones that were true.

If somebody says something false about you there is a defense available. You know it is not so, and even if it stings you have somewhere to stand. What has kept you pinned for years is a sentence where the fact was accurate and the delivery was contemptuous, and the two came in fused, and you have never once been able to get them apart.

So every time you go to reject the contempt, the fact objects. And every time you go to accept the fact, the contempt comes with it. You have been in that loop for a long time and you have never told anybody you are in it, because the sentence was true and admitting you still think about it feels like arguing with reality.

Let me put the plain thing first. You have not been careless with any of this. You have gone at the thing itself repeatedly, more than anybody watching knows about, and got up every time. Somebody who did not care would have discarded the whole sentence.

So this page is not going to tell you the fact was wrong. That would be a lie and you would know it.

I want to show you a scene where somebody is standing in something genuinely filthy and nobody argues about whether it is dirty.

The fusion is the injury

Consider what is actually holding you, because it is not the fact.

You can bear facts. Men bear facts all day. What cannot be borne is a fact welded to contempt, because contempt says something the fact does not: it says that the fact is the whole of a man, and that the whole of him is disgusting.

The fact was information. The contempt was a verdict smuggled in behind it. And because they arrived at the same second, in the same voice, they have been stored as one item.

You have two things stored as one, and no fact has ever once carried a verdict inside it. Zechariah 3:4 says take away the filthy garments from him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates a condition from a judgment about a man.

And notice which one has done the damage. Not the information. You have had the information reconfirmed a hundred times since and it has never once landed the way that sentence landed. It is the contempt that has been operating, all this time, wearing the fact as its clothing.

You have been carrying a verdict dressed as information, and no true thing about you has ever once been the same as contempt. The written word has the filthy garments removed while the filth is never denied, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a covering off a man without arguing about what was underneath.

Take away the filthy garments

The scene in Zechariah is a courtroom, and it is worth reading exactly.

And he answered and spake unto those that stood before him, saying, Take away the filthy garments from him. And unto him he said, Behold, I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee, and I will clothe thee with change of raiment. (Zechariah 3:4, King James Version)

Nobody in that scene disputes the condition. The garments are described as filthy and the word is not softened. The accuser is standing right there and is not contradicted on the facts.

What happens instead is that the garments come off.

You are standing in a scene where the facts are not disputed and the garments still come off, and no accurate accusation has ever once prevented that. Zechariah 3 grants the condition entirely and then removes it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that order of events land on a man who has been arguing about the facts for years.

And read what the man is given. A change of raiment. Not a defense, not an exoneration, not an argument. Clothing.

You have been given clothing rather than an argument, and no man in that scene has ever once had to win the point first. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a change of clothes feel like a change of standing, and the written word says I will clothe thee with change of raiment.

Say the fact plainly

Now the part I came to say, and it is a two-part action.

Say the fact out loud, plainly, with no contempt in your voice. Just the information, in a flat tone, the way you would read a measurement off a gauge. That is the sound of a fact without a verdict attached, and it is possible that sound has never once been heard in this house.

Then say that the contempt is not part of it, and take it off, which is what the verse actually does.

You are able to say a true thing without contempt in it, and no fact has ever once required that tone to be accurate. The written word has the filthy garments taken off while the filth is granted, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a flat tone possible where only one tone has ever been used.

And here is why the plain saying matters. As long as the fact can only be said in that voice, the voice is part of the fact. Said flatly, out loud, once, the fact turns out to be much smaller than it has been, and the contempt turns out to have been almost all of the weight.

You have been carrying mostly contempt, and no measurement of yours has ever once weighed what that sentence weighed. The Spirit of God is the one who lets a man weigh the two halves separately, and Zechariah 3:4 is the written word underneath it, where the garments come off, the iniquity passes, and the man is dressed again.