The One Man I Already Know About

He has been asking for eleven months.

Not casually. He gets up early to do it and he has been consistent about it in a way that would impress you, and he means every word.

Use me. Give me more of You. Let something happen through me.

And every time he prays it, a name comes up.

Same name. Every single time, for eleven months. It has been so consistent that it has stopped feeling like an intrusion into the prayer and started feeling like part of the furniture of the prayer, which is a strange thing for a name to become.

It is a man he knows. Not well. Two miles down the lane, on his own since the spring, and there is a story there that everybody in that valley knows the outline of and nobody knows the middle of.

He has not been. Eleven months.

And if you asked him why, he would give you reasons and every one of them would be honest.

He does not know the man well enough to just turn up. He would not know what to say. It might be intrusive, and there is nothing worse than somebody arriving with a face on. And there is a real risk of making it worse, which is not nothing, and he has seen people make things worse.

All true. And underneath them, the one that is not a reason, which is that going is a real thing with a real door and a real cup of tea and no guarantee at the end of it, and asking is not.

So he has asked, faithfully, at six in the morning, for eleven months, with the answer sitting two miles down the lane.

So let me ask you.

Whose name comes up when you ask God to use you?

The one who stopped was not on his way anywhere important

Everybody knows the story on the Jericho road and I am not going to retell it as though it were new. But there is one thing in it I want you to look at that people go past.

Two men come down that road with somewhere to be, and both of them are men with genuine responsibilities and genuinely full days, and both of them go past on the other side.

And then a third man comes along.

But a Samaritan, as he travelled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him.Luke 10:33

Read the short phrase in the middle of it, the one nobody ever quotes. Came where the man was. You have known the address for eleven months, and the Holy Spirit has not been withholding a sending from a man who already has a name.

Read the little phrase in the middle. Came where the man was.

He did not send anything. He did not undertake to remember him. He arrived at the actual place where an actual person actually was, and the story gives you every detail of what followed: the oil, the wine, the animal, the inn, the two coins, the promise to come back.

It is one of the most physically specific passages in the Gospels, and every single item in it is a thing you can hold in your hand.

Now, the point the parable is answering was a question about definitions. A man had asked who is my neighbor, which is a question about categories, and Jesus answered with a story about a road, which is not.

Hear where you stand, out here at six in the morning.

You are not a man waiting to be commissioned. Scripture puts the whole answer in a Samaritan who came where the man was, and the Spirit has never once withheld a sending from somebody who already had a name.

And I will say the plain thing now, the way we say things leaning on a truck.

I am not going to tell you that asking is wrong. It is not wrong and I am not taking your six o'clock off you.

But asking has one property that makes it dangerous for a certain kind of man, which is that it feels like obedience and costs what waiting costs. And you are exactly that kind of man: serious, faithful, disciplined, and eleven months down the lane from the thing you already know.

The word says power comes for a witness and the Samaritan's entire equipment was oil, wine and a donkey. Nobody in that story received anything before they went.

But you are not a man waiting to be commissioned. Luke 10 puts the whole answer in a Samaritan who came where the man was, carrying oil and wine and nothing else, and the Spirit He poured out has never withheld a sending from somebody who already had a name.