The Far Side Of What I Gave Up

The lodger is twenty-three and asks it with no weight on it at all, halfway through drying a plate.

So what do you do on a Friday?

And the man standing at the sink with his hands in the water finds that he cannot answer the question. Not because it is private. Because there is no answer in there to find. He opens his mouth and something comes out about the shopping and a program he half watches, and the lodger says nice one and puts the plate away, and the conversation moves on to the boiler.

He is fifty-six. He has been serious about God since he was thirty-four.

And in those twenty-two years he has stopped a great many things. He will not list them for you and I am not going to either, because they are his and half of them were right and all of them cost him something. He gave things up carefully, one at a time, usually after a Sunday, usually at some cost to a friendship. Every one of them was a real act of love toward God and none of them was fake.

His house is very tidy. His diary is very clean.

And on a Friday night, at ten past eight, it is so quiet in there that he can hear the fridge.

Here is the thing he has never said, and it is not bitterness, it is something more tired than that. Somebody taught him, thoroughly and well, how to take things out of his life. Nobody ever once sat with him and told him what the space was for.

So the shelf got cleared, and stayed cleared, and after two decades a cleared shelf stops looking like devotion and starts looking like a shelf.

He dries his hands. He goes and sits in the front room with the lamp on. And a memory arrives, uninvited, from about 1978: his grandmother in a hot kitchen making far too much food on a Friday, on purpose, every week, because people came, and they always came, and she never once made the right amount for the people who lived in that house.

He sits with that for a long while.

And now I am going to stop saying he.

Because you have given things up too. You did it out of love, whatever anybody has since said about it, and you did it when it was hard and when nobody was watching.

And somewhere along the way you noticed a quietness where the thing used to be, and you assumed the quietness was the point, and you have been sitting in it, faithfully, for years, wondering privately whether this is all it was.

A vessel is not for emptiness, it is for carrying

Paul is writing to a young man about a great house full of dishes, some for honor and some for the rough work, and then he says the sentence that turns the whole picture, and everybody remembers the first half of it.

If anyone cleanses himself, he will be a vessel for honour, set apart, useful to the Master of the house, prepared for every good work.2 Timothy 2:21

Four things in a row, and count how many of them are about the emptying.

One. The cleansing is one quarter of the sentence, and it is the first quarter, and then Paul keeps walking, and the next three are all direction. Set apart. Useful. Ready for every good work.

Useful. That is the word. Not spotless on a shelf. Not preserved. A cup that has been washed and dried and put away and never once carried across a room to a person who is thirsty has not achieved anything a cup was made for. It is a clean cup in a cupboard. There is nothing wrong with it and nothing has happened.

And notice who the usefulness is to. Useful to the Master of the house. This is not you making yourself impressive. It is you being available to Somebody who has work in this house and hands you the thing He wants carried. The word for set apart, right through the Scriptures, means set aside for a purpose, the way a room is set aside for a guest who is coming. It is a preposition word. It always points somewhere.

So hear this, because it is the correction and it is gentle: what you did in those twenty-two years was not wrong. It was half a sentence.

You were handed the cleansing and never handed the commission. And a person given the first quarter of a sentence and told it was the whole thing will end up exactly where you are, at ten past eight on a Friday, in a clean room, listening to a fridge, quietly wondering what is wrong with them. Nothing is wrong with you. You obeyed what you were given. You were simply never given the rest. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it true in you.

And I want to say one more thing plainly, because this tradition of ours has a habit of implying it. Nobody here is measuring you. Not against the person who seems to have arrived somewhere you have not, not against an experience you may or may not feel you have had. This is not a message about your standing. Your standing was settled by Christ and it is not up for review this evening. This is a message about a shelf.

The founding fire of this house was a plain hall in the middle of a city where nobody was charged for a seat and the people nobody thought were eligible were told they had a clean heart on offer. And what that room was for was not the cleanliness. It was the people who came in off the street and found there was somewhere to sit.

Clean was never the destination. Carried was.

And hold this before the story below. You are set apart toward something, and the toward has been running for the whole twenty-two years whether or not anybody named it out loud. That is what is written over a vessel put aside for the Master, and the Holy Spirit is the one who did the setting apart and He has never once done it to make a space.