So The Room Would Know

She worked it out on a Wednesday, on her own, and it took the air out of her for about a week.

She had been asking for years. Since she was about twenty-two, with real hunger, and nobody who knew her would have doubted for a second that it was genuine.

And on this particular Wednesday, for no reason she could identify, the actual answer came up out of somewhere and stood in front of her.

She wanted it so the room would know.

Not primarily. Not only. She is not a fraud and I will not have her called one. There was hunger in it and love in it and a real desire to see people helped, and all of that was true.

And underneath it, load bearing, there was a woman who had spent her whole childhood being the one nobody looked at, and who had found a place where God gives things to people, and who had wanted to be the one He gave something to, in a room, where it could be seen.

She has never said that out loud to anybody.

And what she did with it, that Wednesday, is the thing I actually want to talk about, because she made a decision in about four minutes and it has cost her three years.

She decided that this disqualified her.

And she stopped asking. Not dramatically. She just stopped, and told nobody, and she has served faithfully ever since with something switched off in her that she switched off herself.

So let me ask you, and answer it honestly, in your own head, where nobody can hear.

Why did you first want it?

He put himself in the sentence

There is a chapter that gets read at weddings and it was not written for weddings. It was written to a church that was in a competition with itself over exactly this, and it lands like a hand on a shoulder rather than a slap.

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.1 Corinthians 13:1 and 2

Now here is the thing I want you to see, and once you see it you cannot unsee it.

I.

He does not write if you speak in the tongues of men. He does not write if a person has all knowledge. He puts himself in every clause, and he keeps doing it for three verses, and Paul is the man who had more of this than anybody he was writing to.

That is not a rhetorical trick. That is a man refusing to stand outside a warning he is delivering.

And notice what he does not say. He does not say the gifts are the problem. He never says stop wanting them, and two chapters later he says the exact opposite in plain words: eagerly desire them.

He says a thing about weight. Without love these are noise, and noise is not nothing, noise is loud, and that is the whole complaint. A gong is not a fake instrument. It is a real one that fills a room and leaves nothing behind.

Hear where you stand, beloved, three years into a silence you imposed on yourself.

You are not disqualified by a motive. Scripture puts the apostle himself into every clause of that warning, and the Spirit never once waited for somebody's reasons to be pure before He would use them.

And I want to say the hard true thing now, and I want to say it with my arm around you.

Nobody has ever had a clean motive. Not one person, not once, in the whole history of anybody wanting anything from God. If purity of motive were the gate, the gate has never opened for a single human being and the book of Acts is a work of fiction.

What you did on that Wednesday was see something true. That was the Holy Spirit and it was a kindness.

What you did in the four minutes after was pass a sentence, and that was not Him, because He does not show a person the truth in order to take something off them.

The word says without love I am a noisy gong, and Paul wrote it about himself and then carried on operating in every one of those gifts for the rest of his life.

So you are not disqualified by a motive, beloved. First Corinthians 13 has Paul putting himself into every clause of that warning and then operating in every gift he had for the rest of his life, and the Spirit He poured out has never waited for a clean reason before He would use somebody.