The Neighbor I Have Never Told

He has been to everything.

Nine conferences in four years. The Tuesday thing, when there was a Tuesday thing. Two whole weekends away, one of them abroad, at some personal expense. He has read more than most people who preach and he has notes from all of it.

And he has lived next door to the same family for eleven years and never once mentioned Jesus to any of them.

I want to be fair to him, because he is not a hypocrite and it would be easy and lazy to call him one.

He is a good neighbor. Genuinely good, in the way that matters when a car will not start or somebody is in hospital. He took their bins out for six weeks one winter without being asked. He knows the children's names and their ages and which one is having a hard time at school.

It is not that he does not care about them. He cares about them a great deal.

It is that the two things have never met.

There is the part of his life where God is, which happens in rooms, with other people who also go to rooms. And there is his street, which is where he lives.

Eleven years, four meters of path, and the two have never once been in the same sentence.

So let me ask you.

Who lives closest to you and knows least about what you believe?

He asked to come along and was sent home instead

There is a man in the Gospels who has just had the worst part of his life ended, and he does the most understandable thing anybody in that book ever does.

He asks to get in the boat.

He wants to go with Jesus. Of course he does. He has been living among the tombs and now he is sitting there dressed and in his right mind, and the man who did that is getting into a boat and leaving, and he wants to be where that is.

And Jesus says no.

Jesus did not let him, but said, Go home to your own people and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how He has had mercy on you.Mark 5:19

Read what he was asking for when he got that answer. He wanted more of the boat. You have been asking for the same thing for four years, and the Holy Spirit answered a man like that by sending him a few meters up his own street.

Read the two halves of that.

Go home to your own people. Not to a crowd. Not to a city. To the specific people who already know you, who knew what you were like before, and who will have opinions.

And tell them. Not explain. Not persuade. Tell them what happened to you, which is the only thing this man has and the only thing he is asked for.

And notice what he was asking for instead. He was asking for more. More proximity, more of the meetings, more of the boat.

He was not asking for a wrong thing. Wanting to be near Jesus is never a wrong thing. And the answer was still no, and the answer was home.

Now hear where you stand.

You are not a man who needs another conference. Scripture puts go home to your own people and tell them in the mouth of Jesus to a man who wanted more of the boat, and the Spirit has never once been given so that somebody could attend better.

And I want to say the gentle version of the hard thing, because this is a family failing and not a personal wickedness.

Those of us who love this part of the faith are prone to one specific drift, and it is that we collect. We accumulate meetings and experiences and notes, and each one is genuine, and the collecting quietly becomes the activity.

Nobody sets out to do it. It happens because a room is where it is happening and a street is not, and rooms are easier.

The word says the power comes for a witness, and a witness is somebody who tells what he saw to people who were not there. Nine conferences is a great deal of seeing. Eleven years is a great deal of not telling.

I am not accusing you. I am one of the people who does this. I am saying it out loud so that we can both stop.

So you are not a man who needs another conference. Mark 5 puts go home to your own people and tell them into the mouth of Jesus, spoken to a man who was asking for more of the boat, and the Spirit was never given so that anybody could attend better.