Nine Of Us And A Memory Of Ninety

Nine. Eleven at Christmas and Easter, and four at the midweek if the weather is decent.

He counts. He would rather not and he cannot stop and it happens somewhere in the second song, entirely automatically, the same way you count the stairs.

And then, immediately after the count, the other thing arrives, and the other thing is the actual problem.

There were ninety in here.

He can see it. That is what makes it worse than a statistic. He can see the back row full and people standing at the side and the door open in July with folk on the step. He was nineteen then and he remembers who sat where, and about two-thirds of them are dead now and most of the rest moved for work.

Nine.

Now, he has not concluded anything about the nine. He would fight you over the nine. Every one of them is faithful and two of them walk a mile to get there in all weathers.

What he has concluded, without ever quite putting it into words, is something about God's opinion of the place.

That is the trouble. Not despair about attendance. A quiet, unexamined, load-bearing belief that a room this size means something, and that the something is not good, and that God is somewhere else now doing something bigger.

So let me ask you.

How many were there when it was full, and how many are there now?

God asked the question before anybody said it out loud

There is a passage in Zechariah about a building site and it is exactly your situation.

The temple is being rebuilt. It is going badly and slowly and it is nothing like the old one, and there are men alive who remember the old one and they have been weeping about it, which is recorded elsewhere and is not a criticism of them.

And into that, God says this.

Who dares despise the day of small things, since the seven eyes of the Lord that range throughout the earth will rejoice when they see the chosen capstone in the hand of Zerubbabel?Zechariah 4:10

Now notice the form of it. It is a question, and it is a slightly indignant one, and God asks it before anybody in the passage has said anything out loud.

Who dares despise.

He is answering a thing that was being thought rather than said. Nobody had stood up and announced that the small version was contemptible. It was in the room, in the way these things are in a room, in the arithmetic that everybody was doing privately.

And He goes straight at it.

Hear where that puts you, in the second song, doing the count.

You are not a man in a failed building. Scripture has God Himself raising the arithmetic before anybody speaks it, and calling the small day a thing not to be despised, and the Holy Spirit poured out on all people has not once counted a room before deciding whether to fill it.

And I want to say the plain thing now, and it is not about numbers at all.

You have not concluded something about attendance. You have concluded something about God's opinion, and those are entirely different, and only one of them is any of your business.

The nine is a fact. It is a true fact and there is no use pretending otherwise, and I am not going to tell you the room will fill, because I do not know and nobody who tells you does, and this house does not put a date on God for anybody.

But you have taken a true fact and read a verdict off it, and the verdict is not in the fact. It never was. You added it, over about eleven years, one Sunday at a time, in the second song.

The word says who dares despise the day of small things, and it was said over a half built house that looked like nothing to men who remembered the other one.

And you are not standing in a failure. Zechariah has God raising the former glory Himself, before anybody says it out loud, and calling the small day a thing not to be despised, and the Holy Spirit never counted a room before deciding to fill it.