The Jobs Nobody Sees

You do the bins on a Wednesday. You do the recycling on the Wednesday too, because the recycling is a separate trip and nobody has ever asked who does it.

You do the chairs. You come at eight to do the chairs, and you know the stacks, and you know which four have the wobble and which corner they go in so the wobble does not matter.

You do the airing. Nobody knows about the airing. In the winter you go up on a Friday and put the heating on for two hours so that the hall is not cold on Sunday, and you go back and turn it off, and you have never mentioned it to a single person in seven years.

You have a key. You have had it longer than the pastor has been there.

And last month they got a contract for the cleaning, and a rota went up on the door with names on it, and yours was not on the rota because the contract covers it, and somebody said, warmly, oh, that will take some weight off you.

You said that was great. You went home and sat in the car outside your own house for eleven minutes without going in.

Because here is what nobody in that building understands, and it is not their fault, and I doubt you have ever put it in a sentence yourself. The jobs were never a burden. The jobs were the receipt.

They were the thing that let you walk through that door at any hour of any day and know exactly why you were entitled to be there. And a contract has just taken your reason away, and underneath the reason there is nothing, and you have been looking at the nothing for four weeks.

Boldly is the word, and it was chosen carefully

There is one verse I want in front of you before anything else, and I want you to read the adverb in it rather than the noun, because the adverb is doing all the work.

Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.Hebrews 4:16

Boldly. Not humbly. Not carefully. Not with an offering in your hands and a good reason prepared.

And look at the room it puts you in. Not a hall. Not a foyer. A throne room, which is the one room in any kingdom where a person absolutely must have a reason to be, and the writer of that letter says walk in there without one.

Take that now, before we go further, because you have been standing in a doorway with a mop for seven years. You have standing in that building that has nothing to do with a rota, and it is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gave it to you the day you believed and has never once billed you for it.

Now, the reason he can say boldly is in the verses just before it, and it is not about you at all. It is that there is a High Priest who has been through everything you have been through and is sitting at that throne right now. The boldness is not your confidence. It is His position, and you are in Him.

So the entitlement you have been manufacturing out of chairs and bins was already issued to you, in full, before you ever picked up a key. That is what the written word means by boldly, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put it in your hands.

The usefulness was real and it was not the ticket

I want to hold two things at once here, because a message that only does one of them will hurt you.

The first is that the work was good. It was genuinely good. Seven years of a warm hall on a Sunday morning that nobody knew was warm on purpose is a real ministry and it counted and God saw all of it. Nothing I say next takes one gram off that.

The second is that you were paying for something the written word had already given you outright, and you have been paying for seven years, and the payment has quietly become the thing that holds up your sense of belonging. The Holy Spirit never sent the invoice you have been settling every Wednesday.

That is how you can tell the difference. When the jobs went, the belonging wobbled. If the jobs had been service, losing them would have been a small sadness. Because they were rent, losing them was eleven minutes in a car.

I say that with no judgement in it whatsoever. You did what a person does when nobody has ever told them plainly that the door is free. You found a way to be sure, and the way you found was to make yourself necessary, and it worked for seven years.

But you have a place at that throne that no contract can touch. His word says come boldly, and the Spirit of God is the one who carries you in there, and there has never been a moment when your standing depended on a stack of chairs.

The hall in Los Angeles

In 1895 a man named Phineas Bresee opened a hall near the middle of Los Angeles and made one decision that people still talk about, which was that not one seat in it could be rented.

The thing that made that radical was not generosity. Plenty of churches were generous. It was that he removed the mechanism by which a person could establish their own right to be there.

Because a rented pew is not really about the seat. It is about certainty. A household that has paid for a row knows, on a bad week, in a low season, when they have nothing to say to anybody, that they are entitled to walk in. Bresee took that certainty away from everyone, and then he replaced it with a better one, which is that the room was for the ones who had nothing.

You built yourself a rented pew out of Wednesdays. It was the only currency you had and you spent it faithfully.

Put it down. The written word already seated you and the Holy Spirit already sealed it, and the contract cannot reach a single part of that.