Standing In The Fourth Row

They call them up near the end, which is the right place for it. Four of them going out with the building team in September, the couple who are moving to take on the little church by the bypass, and the new youth worker, who is about twenty three and has gone bright red.

Everybody stands. People put hands on shoulders, somebody prays a good prayer, the sort that has clearly been thought about rather than assembled at the microphone, and the room means every word of it.

Rob is in the fourth row, clapping, and he means it too. He has known two of those four for fifteen years. He gave the youth worker a lift to his interview.

And underneath the clapping there is a sentence, and it is so old he no longer hears it as a sentence. It is more like the floor. It goes: this is the real work, and what I do is what pays for me to be able to help with it at weekends.

He has been building things since he was nineteen. He writes code. He is very good at it, not that he would say so, and this week he has been three days inside a problem that four other people had walked away from, and on Thursday at about half past four he got it, and the feeling in his chest was so close to worship that it frightened him slightly, and he told nobody, because who would you tell.

On Sunday nobody asks about Thursday. There is no reason why anybody should. But nothing in fifteen years has ever suggested to Rob that Thursday afternoon was anything other than his own private business, done in his own time, on the money side of his life.

You know the fourth row. Perhaps you have never put it into words either. You make things, or you fix things, or you keep things running that other people use without ever knowing your name, and somewhere a long way back you accepted that this is the part of your life God is not particularly involved in, and that the real work happens on a Sunday and is done by somebody at the front.

The first man in Scripture who was filled

I want to show you something, and then I want to say plainly what it means, because it has been sitting in the middle of the Bible your whole life and almost nobody has pointed at it.

There is a first time Scripture says that God filled a man with His Spirit. It is not a prophet. It is not a king, and it is not a preacher. Read it slowly.

And I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, to work in every craft.Exodus 31:3-5

That is a maker. God names him, Bezalel, son of Uri, and He fills him with His own Spirit, and the thing He fills him for is the work of his hands. Ability, intelligence, knowledge, craft. Metal, stone, wood. Not so that Bezalel would later do something more spiritual with the standing it gave him. For the making itself.

So hear this where you are sitting, before the day starts or after it has finished. You are not on the money side of anybody's life. The written word puts the Spirit of God on a craftsman for craft, and the Spirit who did that has not since decided that hands are second class.

You are a man the Spirit of God has been named over at his own bench, and that was true on Thursday afternoon. Exodus 31:3 puts the Spirit of God on a craftsman for ability and knowledge in the making itself, and the Holy Spirit did not hand that back at the end of the chapter.

Notice what is not in the passage, because that matters just as much. God does not tell Bezalel that the work counts because of what it will be used for later. He does not say the workmanship is a platform, or a testimony, or a way of getting near people. He says: I have filled him, to do this. The work is received as work.

I spend most of my life among old manuscripts, and there is something in that world that took me years to understand properly. A scribe who copied a page well was not doing a lesser task than the man who first spoke the words. Nobody thanked him. Most of them we cannot name. But the care in the ruling of the lines, the evenness of the hand at the bottom of a column when his arm ached, the decision to do the last four lines as well as the first four when no one alive would ever check: that is not a service industry attached to the real thing. It is the thing, in one of the forms the thing takes.

You have been carrying something heavier than a low opinion of your job. What you have been carrying is a divided life, and the division was never God's idea. The word of God has one man's whole week in view rather than an hour of it, and the Holy Spirit is not on shift only in the room where the singing happens.

Take the honest half of it too. Some of what you make will be used in ways you would not choose, and some of it will be switched off in ten years, and none of that is being brushed over here. But the receiving of your work does not wait on the far end of it. What is given today is given today, and what happens to it afterwards is His and not yours to secure.

And there is a part in this that nobody at the front can do for you. The offering has to be made. Not a better attitude, not a general sense that God cares about ordinary life: the actual work of the actual day, handed over out loud, at the desk where it happens, before it starts.

You are not on the money side of anybody's life, and you never have been. The written word gives a maker the Spirit of God for gold and stone and timber, and the Holy Spirit has been with you in fifteen years of Thursdays that nobody heard about.