I Went Looking For The Number

The sports hall has badminton lines on the floor and a stage built out of gray blocks at one end, and there are about two hundred plastic chairs on the badminton lines, and the heaters up in the roof come on in the middle of the last session and everybody looks up at the same moment.

It has been a good day. That is worth saying properly, because it is true and because the easy version of this story would make it somebody's fault. The man speaking is a good man. He has been doing this for thirty years, he has never once been showy about it, and everything he said today was accurate. He was not manipulating anybody. He believes it, and he loves the people in front of him, and you could hear both.

At the end there is a card on every chair. It has three lines on it and a space at the bottom.

And you sit there with a biro that came out of your own bag, in the second row from the back, and you feel the thing arrive that always arrives, which is not conviction and is not excitement. It is arithmetic.

Because here is what nobody in this hall knows about you. You have been keeping a running total since you were nineteen. Not on paper. In your head, quietly, continuously, the way some people keep a running total of what they owe. Every talk you have ever heard has ended with something you are supposed to be doing about the people around you, and every one of them has added a line to it, and not one of them has ever taken a line off.

You could not tell anybody the figure. That is the strange part. There is no number you could actually say out loud, and yet you are certain, absolutely certain, that you are behind on it.

So let us actually read the sentence

I want to do something slow with you now, and it is the only useful thing I know to do with a debt nobody can produce the paperwork for. Let us go and find the paperwork.

The sentence underneath every one of those talks is three verses long, and the Spirit who breathed it has never once been in a hurry with anybody reading it. Here it is, whole.

You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.Matthew 5:14-16

Read it as a document. Look for the obligation, because that is what has been sitting on you for thirty years and it should not be hard to find.

The first clause is a statement of fact. You are. Not you should be, not you could be if you applied yourself, not become. It is spoken over a hillside of fishermen and farmers and people with nothing before a single one of them had done anything about it, and it is in the flat present tense of a thing that is simply so.

You were told what you are before you were asked for anything, and the order of those two things in the text is the whole of your relief. That is not my reading dropped over the top of it; it is what is written, in the order it is written in, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an old sentence arrive in a person as a fact about themselves rather than as information.

The second clause is a city on a hill, and notice that it is not an instruction either. A city does not do anything in order to be visible. It is described, not commanded. Nobody tells the city to try harder at being on a hill.

The third is the lamp, and here is the part I would like you to be very precise about. Nobody lights a lamp and puts it under a basket. Two verbs there, and neither of them belongs to the lamp. The lamp does not light itself and the lamp does not place itself. Somebody else does both, and the only thing the lamp is described as doing is giving light to the house, which is not an activity it undertakes but the consequence of being lit.

Where the obligation actually is, and how small it turns out to be

There is one imperative in the whole passage, and I am not going to pretend otherwise, because pretending would be no comfort at all and you would smell it.

Let your light shine.

Now hear what kind of verb that is. It is permissive. It is the same shape as let it, allow it, stop preventing it. It is not go and shine, and it is not shine harder, and it is set in a sentence whose picture is a basket being taken off something already burning. The command is to stop covering. It presumes the light and it presumes the burning, and the only action left in it is the removal of an obstruction.

You have never been under an order to generate anything, and the one command in the passage assumes that what is being talked about is already lit in you. The word puts it there in a permissive verb rather than a driving one, and His Spirit is the one keeping alight the thing the sentence assumes, which is why nobody in this has ever been asked for output.

And then the last clause, which is the one I most want you to see, because it is where your total finally comes apart.

So that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.

Read the end of the transaction. Where does the result go? To the Father. The whole outcome clause is about honor arriving at God, and there is no counterpart clause anywhere about a tally arriving at you. No figure. No frequency. No annual review, no minimum, no target, no shortfall.

I have gone through it with the care of a man who does this for a living, and I will tell you plainly what is not in it. There is no number in it. There is no number anywhere in it, and there never has been, and the total in your head was not issued by this text.

You are the light of the world today, at this precise moment, owing nobody a figure, and that is the settled reading of what is written rather than a kindness I am extending to you. The Holy Spirit is well able to make a person hear that about themselves, and He does not need you to feel it before it is true.

Nobody in that hall did this to you

One thing has to be said carefully here, because a release like this is worth nothing if it arrives with somebody to blame.

The good man on the stage did not hand you that total. Nor did your church, nor the person who discipled you at nineteen, nor any of the fifty speakers whose names have long since gone. They were saying true things, and every one of them meant to hand you a gift.

What happened is that a fact was heard as a demand, over and over, for thirty years, and each time a small amount of arithmetic settled on the fact like dust, and eventually the fact was under it. That is not anybody's crime. It is what happens to any true sentence that is used as a hook often enough, and the honest remedy is not an accusation, it is a dusting.

So let that room off the hook, and let yourself off it in the same breath. You are free of a total God never set, and you were free of it on the Saturday you first started counting. Matthew 5:16 says they will see and glorify your Father, which puts both the seeing and the counting in His hands rather than yours, and it is written that way on purpose. The Spirit has been carrying those names the whole time, and He was never waiting on your arithmetic.