Fourteenth in the Rank

Fourteenth. Which means an hour, near enough, because the last inbound is late and everybody knows it is late and there is nothing whatever to be done about it.

So the drivers do what drivers do. Four of them out of the cars, standing round the bonnet of the third one because the engine is still warm and it is a cold evening, and a flask going round, and one man telling a story about a fare to a village nobody has heard of that everybody has heard him tell twice. There is an argument going about a roundabout. There is a younger one who has been doing this eleven weeks and is being taught, kindly and relentlessly, which of the terminals is worth waiting at.

He is the one leaning on the wing with the tea. He laughs in the right places, and he means it, and he is well liked by every man standing there. Somebody asks him something about his daughter and he answers properly and warmly and then turns the question round the way a good host does, and the talk goes off somewhere else, and nobody notices that it went off him.

Nineteen years he has done this. He is very good at it now.

And what sits underneath it is not a secret he is keeping. That is the part people get wrong from the outside. It is a record. A long one, kept carefully, added to, reread on the bad nights, and it is written in handwriting that is not his, because somebody else did the thing and he has been keeping the file.

If that is you, sit down here with me. I am not going to ask you what it was. Not now, not later, not at the end of this message. I am not going to ask you to tell any human being anything at all, ever. There is nothing in this that wants the thing itself, and there never will be.

The file is in somebody else's hand

In my grandmother's house there was a ledger with the accounts of a small business in it, and it was written in three different hands over about forty years, and you could tell at a glance whose was whose. That is how a ledger works. The writing tells you who was standing at the counter.

Take out the file you have been keeping and look at the writing.

You did not do that. Somebody else did, and their hands did it, and God has never for one second confused their hands with yours. He arranged the whole moral order so that could not happen: Scripture says plainly that the soul that sins is the one that bears it, that a son does not carry his father's guilt and a father does not carry his son's, and that no person is ever charged with what another person's hands did.

You are keeping a file that belongs to somebody else, and you were never the one it was opened against. That is not warmth from me. The written word divides an act from the person it was done to and refuses to blur the line, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it down into a man standing at a taxi rank with a cup in his hand.

The LORD also will be a refuge for the oppressed, a refuge in times of trouble.Psalm 9:9

That word for refuge is not a cupboard and it is not a hiding place. It is a high place. A tower on rock, built so that a thing that wants you cannot get up to where you are.

And read who it is built for. The oppressed. Not the ones who did something and need covering. The ones who were done to and have been living at ground level ever since, in reach of whatever comes past.

You have a high place that was raised for exactly the person you are, and you were the one it was built for. That is what the written word says outright in that psalm, and His Spirit is the one who walks a man up the stairs of it after nineteen years at ground level.

A host, and never a guest

There is one more thing I want to name, because you will recognize it and nobody has ever said it to you.

You have become extremely good at turning a question round. Somebody asks about you and, without any decision being made, you have already asked about them, warmly, with real interest, and they walk away feeling well attended to and having told you a good deal, and the exchange was entirely genuine, and it was also a door closing very softly.

That is hospitality doing a job it was never meant to do. And I am not going to tell you to stop it, because you may need it for years yet, and this message is not going to hand you one more thing to fix.

You are welcome in a room as a guest and not only as the one serving it, and you have that standing already. Scripture says we have been received, and it is His Spirit, not an act of will on a cold evening, who makes a received man able to sit down.