The Number Is Not The Verdict

He knows before he is out of the car park.

Not exactly. Within two or three, and he has tested himself on it and he is nearly always right, because he has been doing it for so long that it happens without any effort at all.

And then it colors the week.

That is the part he would not have admitted out loud until this year. A good Sunday and he is a different man on the Monday. He is more generous, he takes things better, he rings people. A thin Sunday and there is a weight on him from about nine on Monday morning that does not lift until Wednesday, and everybody in his house can tell, and his wife stopped asking about it years ago because the asking made it worse.

Nobody at that church knows he does this.

They think he is the least anxious man there. He is the one who says the true and steady thing when everybody else is agitated, and he means every word of it, and it has held people together more than once.

And on the way home he is counting.

He worked out this spring, on a Tuesday, driving, that he has been reading a weekly report card on his standing with God for about eleven years, and that the number on it is a number of people who happened to be free on a particular Sunday morning.

He knoweth not how

Lean on that gate a minute, because there is a parable in Mark that almost nobody preaches, and the whole of it is about the part a man cannot see.

And said, So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground; and should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how.Mark 4:26 to 27

He knoweth not how.

That is not a criticism of the man. It is the point of the parable. He does the casting, which is real work, and then there is an entire process that he has no access to whatsoever, and the parable says outright that he does not know how it happens.

And look at what he does while it is going on: he sleeps, and rises, night and day.

He is not standing over it. He is not lifting the soil to check. He goes to bed, and the thing that he cannot do and cannot see and cannot influence carries on happening in the dark without him.

Hear this at your own gate. You are not slack, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture has the man sleep through the exact process he cannot control and does not call it laziness anywhere, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has had you saying the steady thing in that room for eleven years.

Now let me name what the counting is doing, because it is not vanity and vanity is a poor word for a man who rings people on a Monday.

A number is the only thing about that room you can measure.

You cannot measure whether the woman in the third row went home different. You cannot measure what happened in a fifteen year old during the singing, or whether the thing you said landed in the one man it was for. All of that is real and none of it produces a figure by Monday morning.

So a man who cares enormously and has no instrument reaches for the one number that exists, and eleven years later it has become the report card, not because he decided that but because nothing else could be read.

Hear this too, and let it land at the fence line. You are not being graded on Sundays, and Scripture is what says so. What is written puts the growing in the dark where the man has no access and calls it the kingdom of God, and the Spirit of God has never once issued a weekly report on anybody.

And let me be plain, because this is where these articles go wrong. Nobody here is promising you a fuller room, and nobody is telling you that a thin Sunday is secretly better. A full room is a good thing. It is just not a message, and it has never once been a message, and you have been reading it as one for eleven years.