This Is A Day Of Good News

Something good happened to him in a hard year and he has told almost nobody.

I want to be careful about this because it is the opposite of the usual problem, and the usual sermon does not fit it.

He is not boastful. He has not been going round the place telling everybody. The trouble runs the other way entirely.

It was a genuinely difficult couple of years, for him and for a great many people around him, and it has not lifted for most of them. That is the situation he is in. And in the middle of it, something came good for him, and it is still good.

And it has made him quiet.

Because how do you say it. Standing next to a man who has had a terrible year, in a place where a lot of people have had terrible years, how do you open your mouth about a thing going right without it landing as a boast, or worse, as a suggestion that you did something they did not.

So he has gone very still about it. And the stillness has been going on for about eleven months now, and it started as consideration and it has turned into something else, and lately he has begun to suspect that some of what is keeping him quiet is not kindness at all but a wish not to be examined.

So let me ask you.

What good thing are you holding while people you know go without?

Four men outside a starving city worked it out for themselves

There is a story in Second Kings that almost nobody preaches and it is one of the most human things in the whole book.

A city is under siege and starving. Outside the gate there are four men with a skin condition who are not permitted inside, and they have a conversation that is entirely practical: we will die here, and we will die if we go in, so we may as well go over to the enemy camp and see what happens.

And they get there and the camp is empty. Everybody has fled and left everything, and these four men, who have had nothing for weeks, walk into tent after tent and eat and drink and start carrying things off and hiding them.

Which is exactly what anybody would do.

And then, in the middle of it, one of them says this.

Then they said to each other, What we are doing is not right. This is a day of good news and we are keeping it to ourselves.2 Kings 7:9

Nobody made them say it. There is no prophet standing there. God does not speak in this passage at all. Four men who have just been handed everything after a very long time of nothing stop in the middle of a tent and work it out themselves.

This is a day of good news and we are keeping it to ourselves.

And they go back to a city that had excluded them, at night, and tell the gatekeepers.

Hear where you stand, eleven months into a silence.

You are not a man being tactful. Scripture gives that sentence to four men nobody would have blamed for staying in the camp, and the Holy Spirit has not given anybody something good in order to make them careful.

And I want to say the honest thing, because you have already half said it to yourself.

Some of what has kept you quiet is genuine consideration and I honor it. There is a way of telling good news that lands on a hurting person like a weight, and you have been right to be careful about that.

And some of it, lately, has been a wish not to be looked at.

Those two have been living in the same silence for a while now and it has become quite hard to tell them apart from the inside. That is not wickedness; it is what happens when a good instinct goes eleven months without being examined.

The word says power comes so that we will be witnesses, and the four men did not have a message and did not have a theology. They had a camp full of food and a city that did not know.

So you are not being tactful. Second Kings gives that sentence to four men nobody would have blamed for staying in the camp, and no prophet is in the room and God does not speak in the chapter, and the Holy Spirit never given anybody something good in order to make them careful.