{"id":559,"date":"2026-07-30T06:32:15","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T11:32:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/?p=559"},"modified":"2026-07-30T06:32:16","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T11:32:16","slug":"nine-years-in-the-same-seat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/2026\/07\/30\/nine-years-in-the-same-seat\/","title":{"rendered":"Nine Years in the Same Seat"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"rtd-wrap\">\n<style>\n@import url('https:\/\/fonts.googleapis.com\/css2?family=Oswald:wght@500;600&family=Lora:ital,wght@0,400;0,600;1,400&display=swap');\n.rtd-wrap{background:#F1EBDD;color:#2B241D;font-family:'Lora',Georgia,serif;padding:36px 30px;max-width:760px;margin:0 auto;border-radius:4px}\n.rtd-wrap .rtd-kicker{font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-weight:500;letter-spacing:.18em;text-transform:uppercase;font-size:12px;color:#6E5540;margin:0}\n.rtd-wrap .rtd-title{font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-weight:600;font-size:34px;line-height:1.15;margin:8px 0 0;color:#2B241D}\n.rtd-wrap .rtd-soil{height:2px;background:#6E5540;margin:18px 0 22px;opacity:.55}\n.rtd-wrap .rtd-verse{font-style:italic;font-size:19px;line-height:1.6;border-left:4px solid #46633C;padding-left:18px;margin:0 0 26px}\n.rtd-wrap .rtd-cite{font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-style:normal;font-weight:500;font-size:13px;letter-spacing:.08em;color:#6E5540;display:block;margin-top:10px}\n.rtd-wrap .rtd-body p{font-size:18px;line-height:1.75;margin:0 0 18px}\n.rtd-wrap .rtd-deep{background:rgba(110,85,64,.09);border-left:4px solid #6E5540;padding:20px 22px;margin:28px 0}\n.rtd-wrap .rtd-deep-label{font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-weight:600;letter-spacing:.16em;text-transform:uppercase;font-size:12px;color:#6E5540;margin:0 0 12px}\n.rtd-wrap .rtd-deep p{font-size:17px;line-height:1.7;margin:0 0 14px}\n.rtd-wrap .rtd-deep p:last-child{margin-bottom:0}\n.rtd-wrap .rtd-pull{font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-weight:500;font-size:22px;line-height:1.35;color:#46633C;border-top:2px solid #DBB569;border-bottom:2px solid #DBB569;padding:18px 0;margin:30px 0;text-align:center}\n.rtd-wrap .rtd-close{font-size:18px;line-height:1.75;margin:0}\n.rtd-wrap .rtd-foot{font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-weight:500;font-size:12px;letter-spacing:.16em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#6E5540;text-align:center;margin:30px 0 0}\n@media (max-width:600px){.rtd-wrap{padding:26px 20px}.rtd-wrap .rtd-title{font-size:28px}.rtd-wrap .rtd-body p,.rtd-wrap .rtd-close{font-size:17px}}\n<\/style>\n  <p class=\"rtd-kicker\">Rooted \/ Week 4 \/ His Church<\/p>\n  <h2 class=\"rtd-title\">Nine Years in the Same Seat<\/h2>\n  <div class=\"rtd-soil\"><\/div>\n  <blockquote class=\"rtd-verse\">For those who live in Jerusalem and their rulers, because they did not recognize him nor understand the utterances of the prophets, which are read every Sabbath, fulfilled them by condemning him.<span class=\"rtd-cite\">&mdash; Acts 13:27 (ESV)<\/span><\/blockquote>\n  <div class=\"rtd-body\">\n    <p>A man had been at the same church for nine years. Same service, roughly the same seat, and lately the same feeling on the drive home. That was fine.<\/p>\n    <p>He was not in rebellion. He was not in crisis. He was present. Present is a much quieter problem than absent, because present looks exactly like obedience from the outside and can be running on nothing at all on the inside.<\/p>\n    <p>One Sunday the passage read out loud was one he had heard a dozen times. Nothing about it was new. Something in it caught anyway, not a new fact but a new weight, and he sat there with his ears actually open for the first time in months.<\/p>\n    <p>He started writing one sentence in his phone every Sunday after that. Just one. The thing he did not want to walk out of the building without. Nine years of attendance turned into about eleven weeks of actually receiving.<\/p>\n    <p>Paul stood up in a synagogue in Antioch and said something devastating about people who loved Scripture. They heard the prophets read every Sabbath. They did not recognize Him. And in condemning Him, they fulfilled the very words they had been listening to their entire lives.<\/p>\n    <p>That is not a story about wicked people. That is a story about familiar people. Familiarity is a kind of deafness and it does not feel like anything at all. It feels like Sunday.<\/p>\n    <p>Joy is the power to endure adversity, and it fills us with hope. Some seasons in church are adversity of a strange and unglamorous kind. Nothing is wrong. Nothing is alive either. Joy is what walks us back through the doors in that season still expecting God to say something, because He said He would.<\/p>\n  <\/div>\n  <div class=\"rtd-deep\">\n    <p class=\"rtd-deep-label\">In the Original<\/p>\n    <p>Paul&#8217;s charge in Acts 13:27 is agnoeo, translated did not recognize. It means simply I do not know, and it appears 22 times in the New Testament.<\/p>\n    <p>English took that root and made agnostic out of it, a word we now use for someone standing outside the faith without enough information to come in.<\/p>\n    <p>The men Paul is describing were the opposite of uninformed. They had the prophets read aloud to them every Sabbath of their lives. They could quote the text. Some of them had it memorized as boys.<\/p>\n    <p>And Paul says they did not know Him. Not because the information was withheld, but because information was never the thing that produces recognition.<\/p>\n  <\/div>\n  <div class=\"rtd-deep\">\n    <p class=\"rtd-deep-label\">What Gets Diluted<\/p>\n    <p>We are the most biblically resourced generation in history and it is not particularly close. Every translation, every commentary, every sermon ever preached, searchable, free, on the device in our pocket.<\/p>\n    <p>Access has quietly started counting as intimacy. We have listened to the podcast, so we feel taught. We have the app streak, so we feel faithful. We showed up, so we feel close.<\/p>\n    <p>Acts 13 is the warning shot. It is possible to have the Word read over us every single week for our entire life and still not recognize the One it is about. Familiarity is not the same as knowing, and the men in that synagogue proved it in the worst possible way.<\/p>\n  <\/div>\n  <div class=\"rtd-pull\">Attendance is not the same as listening, and He can tell the difference.<\/div>\n  <p class=\"rtd-close\">God speaks through His Church, in the room, out loud, on a schedule. The gift is that we do not have to find it. We have to show up expecting it.<\/p>\n  <p class=\"rtd-foot\">Stumble Up &middot; www.thestumbleup.com<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rooted \/ Week 4 \/ His Church Nine Years in the Same Seat For those who live in Jerusalem and their rulers, because they did not recognize him nor understand the utterances of the prophets, which are read every Sabbath,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":560,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-rooted"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/SU_20260730_BLOG.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=559"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":561,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559\/revisions\/561"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}