The Hall They Hired For Nothing

They had to put the chairs out in rows, which tells you what he was expecting.

Forty of them. He counted them out himself on the Thursday, and then he went back on the Friday and did the row spacing again because it was not right.

He had told people. Not vaguely. He had stood up and said what he believed God was going to do, and he had put a date on it, and he had asked them to come, and they had come, because he is the sort of man people come for.

Some of them traveled. One family drove four hours. A woman he barely knew took a day off work she could not afford to take.

And nothing happened.

Not a disaster. Nothing dramatic. They sang, and he spoke, and they waited, and at about half nine it became clear to everybody in that room at approximately the same moment that they were now simply forty people sitting in a hall on a Tuesday evening.

He stood at the door and said goodnight to every single one of them as they left. He does not remember what he said. He remembers a man about his own age putting a hand on his shoulder on the way past and not saying anything, and he thinks about that more than he thinks about the rest of it.

Then he stacked the chairs, because somebody had to, and it took him about forty minutes, and he did it alone.

If you have ever stacked chairs after something that did not happen, come and sit down at this table. Nobody is going to ask you to account for it.

The object of the sentence is a Person

There is a line written by a man in a prison, at the end of a life that had not gone the way anybody expected, and every word in it is load-bearing.

For I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.2 Timothy 1:12

Read the second word of it and then read what it points at.

He does not say I know what I have believed. He says whom. The object of his faith is not a statement, not a schedule, not an outcome and not a prediction. It is a Person, and Paul is careful about it in a sentence where he had every opportunity to be careless.

That distinction is the whole of what is available to you tonight, because it locates where the failure actually happened.

You are still holding on to the thing you were actually holding on to, and it was never the date. 2 Timothy 1:12 puts the whole weight of a man's confidence on a Person rather than on an expectation, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that fastened in somebody whose expectation has just come apart, which means what broke in that hall was a prediction and not your faith.

What you owe those forty people

Now the part that has actually been carried all this time, because it is not the disappointment.

You brought them into it. A woman took a day she could not afford. A family drove four hours. And you have been doing sums about that ever since.

You are free of a ledger that was settled at the door on the night, and nothing has been accruing since. Romans 13:8 says owe no man any thing, but to love one another, and it is written of a debt love keeps paying rather than one shame keeps counting, and it is the same Spirit who sheds that love abroad in a heart, which means the sums you have been doing about a woman and a four hour drive were closed before you turned the lights off.

So let me say plainly what you owe them, and it is less than you think.

You gave it standing at that door, saying goodnight to every one of them rather than going out the back way. That was the whole of the debt and you paid it on the night.

You do not owe them an explanation, because you do not have one, and inventing one would be worse than the silence. You do not owe them a reason it did not happen. Nobody has that and anybody who offers you one is guessing.

You are not carrying a debt to those forty people, and you settled what there was at the door. Romans 14:4 asks who are you to judge another man's servant, since to his own master he stands or falls, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one who actually holds a servant up, which means their verdict on you was never the one that decides anything.

And here is the other half. You were held all the way through that evening, including the forty minutes with the chairs. Isaiah 41:10 says fear thou not, for I am with thee, I will strengthen thee, yea, I will help thee, and it is His Spirit who is called the Helper, which means the man stacking chairs on his own in an empty hall was not on his own in it.

I am not going to tell you why it did not happen. I do not know and neither does anybody else. What I can tell you is what did not fail: God did not, you did not stop being His, and the man who put forty chairs in rows because he believed something is not somebody to be embarrassed about.