Nobody Told You When It Met

It was announced. That is the part that makes this hard to talk about without sounding like you are complaining about a gift.

He said it from the front. He said your name, and he said the committee's name, and he said he was delighted, and about nine people turned round and smiled at you and two of them said something nice afterwards in the foyer.

That was in March.

It has met four times.

You know it has met four times because you have heard about all four of them afterwards, in ordinary conversation, from people who assumed you had been there. Twice somebody has said something to you that only makes sense if you were in the room. Once, in June, a woman said, honestly and warmly, that she had thought your point about the timing was a good one, and you had to work out in about a second and a half how to answer a compliment about a point you never made.

You asked once. In April. You said it lightly, in a corridor, the way you have to say a thing like that: is there a date for the next one.

And he said he would check, and he meant it, and he did not check.

You have not asked again. Nine months. And you know exactly why you have not asked again, and it is not pride. It is that the second ask is a different kind of ask. The first one is admin. The second one says out loud that something is wrong, and the moment you say something is wrong you become a person with a problem, and you have watched what happens to those people in that building.

So it sits there. You are on a committee that meets without you, and every single person in that congregation thinks you are on it, including the ones who tell you about the meetings.

Moses had a chance to keep it small and he refused

There is a scene in the wilderness that hardly ever gets preached and it is one of the great scenes in the whole book.

God has just put His Spirit on seventy elders and they have prophesied. Two men who were not at the tent, who were still back in the camp, get it as well, and start prophesying where they stand. A young man runs to Moses to report the irregularity, and Joshua, of all people, says my lord Moses, forbid them.

And Moses says this.

Enviest thou for my sake? would God that all the Lord's people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit upon them!Numbers 11:29

Read what he refuses to do. He is being handed, on a plate, by a loyal assistant, a reason to shrink the circle back to the room where it started. Everyone would have understood. There was a tent, there was a list, and those two men were not on it.

And he will not have it. His answer is not that the two are permitted. It is that he wishes it were everybody.

So take this now, before we go further, because you have been standing in a corridor for nine months. You have the Spirit of God on you and it did not come through a list. The written word puts the anointing on all the Lord's people as the thing Moses actually wanted, and the Holy Spirit distributes where He wills and He does not clear it with a diary.

The list is not the anointing

Now let me say the sharp thing, because the written word calls you anointed and the Holy Spirit says so over you, and a person that God has spoken over is worth more than a page of sympathy.

There are two griefs sitting on you and they are not the same size, and you have been treating the small one as though it were the big one.

The written word says the Spirit is poured out on the Lord's people, so let the two griefs be sized honestly against it. The small grief is the meetings. You have missed four. Honestly, in the eternal scheme, you have missed four meetings and there is a case that you have had a lucky year.

The big grief is what nine months of it has taught you about yourself, and the Holy Spirit is the one who will take it out. That is the one doing the damage. Because you have begun to wonder whether the reason nobody sends the date is that somebody, somewhere, made an assessment, and you have started to half agree with the assessment, and that is a wound the enemy will keep open for a decade if he is allowed to.

He is not allowed to.

You are anointed for the work and it is not a list that anoints. His word says the Spirit is put upon the Lord's people and Moses wished it on all of them, and the Holy Spirit put what you carry into you directly, without an agenda and without a chairman.

What Bresee removed from the room

In 1895 a man named Phineas Bresee opened a plain hall near the middle of Los Angeles, and the rule he made about it is still repeated a hundred and thirty years later: not one seat in that building could be rented.

Understand what that actually removed. Not expense. Certainty about rank.

In a room with bought pews, the families in the good rows are the ones the church runs on, and everybody knows it, and nobody has to be told, and it never has to be said out loud in a corridor. The ranking simply exists, permanently, as furniture.

And the deadly thing about a ranking nobody says out loud is that you cannot ask about it. There is no question you can put. You can only read it and adjust, week after week, forever.

That is exactly what nine months of no dates has been doing to you, and it is why the second ask feels so enormous. You are not asking about a diary. You are asking a room to say out loud a thing it has only ever said in furniture.

You are seated equally in that house. The written word says so and the Spirit of God has never once run a room on a rank.