They Sing It Nothing Like I Do

Eleven months, and he has not missed a Sunday.

He moved for work. He joined the nearest church, deliberately, on principle, because he has always said that a man should worship where he lives rather than drive across a city looking for his own taste, and he meant it and he still means it.

He sits in the fourth row from the back on the left.

And every single week, without any decision on his part, he marks it.

The music is too long and the words are too few. There is a moment about eight minutes in where the band drops out and the room sings on its own, and he can see what it is for, and it does not do to him what it plainly does to the woman in front of him.

Announcements at the wrong point. Coffee before rather than after. A closing that is not really a closing, more a dwindle.

He does not say any of this. He has never said one word of it to anybody in that building and he is not going to. He is polite, he stacks chairs, he took a turn on the door at Christmas.

But there is a small permanent commentary running in him, week after week, and he has begun to notice how tired it is making him.

Two Sundays ago the woman in front of him was crying during the long bit with the few words, in a way that had nothing performed in it at all, and he was, at that exact moment, thinking about the announcements.

He has thought about that a great deal since.

Receive one another, which is not the same as approving

Sit in the fourth row a minute after everybody has gone, because there is an instruction in Romans given to two groups who found each other's practice genuinely difficult, and it is not the instruction people assume.

Paul spends a whole chapter on people with real differences: what they ate, which days they kept, what they thought about food that had been somewhere it should not have been. He does not tell them to stop caring. He tells them not to despise each other over it, and then he says this.

Wherefore receive ye one another, as Christ also received us, to the glory of God.Romans 15:7

Receive. Not agree. Not admire. Not conclude that they were right all along.

And the standard is not your assessment of them. It is how Christ received us, which was not on the basis of our being well arranged.

Hear this in your fourth row. You are not in the wrong building, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture says receive one another as Christ received us, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been in that room every Sunday you have been marking it, and He was not waiting for the closing to improve.

Now let me name what the commentary is costing you, because you have felt it and not named it.

A man who is assessing a room cannot be in it. Those are two different postures and the body can only hold one at a time, and you have been in the assessing posture for eleven months, forty five Sundays, at the very hour you most needed the other one, while the Holy Spirit was doing what the written word says He does in that room anyway.

That is not a sin exactly, and nothing written in Scripture names it as one. It is a formed habit, and it came from somewhere good: you were formed carefully, by people who took worship seriously, the Holy Spirit was in that forming, and the care they gave you is real and I will not talk you out of it.

But care that only ever runs as evaluation turns into a wall, and you were the one who built it, and you can be the one who takes it down.

Hear this too, and let it land where the tiredness is. You are not a visitor there, and Scripture is what says so. What is written puts a whole congregation under the instruction to receive, and the Spirit of God is the one who made you a member of that body when you walked in, and a member who is grading the body is grading himself.

And now the woman in front, because she is the whole sermon.

Two Sundays ago the Holy Spirit was doing something in her, in the long bit with the few words, in the exact minutes you were spending on the announcements. Not despite the way that church does it. Through the way that church does it, exactly as the written word says He works through whatever He pleases.

Which means the thing you have been marking down is a thing He has been using, and you have been sitting eighteen inches behind the evidence for eleven months.