The Mats Are Already Down

The green gets cut on a Monday and the mats go down about six on a Tuesday whether anybody has turned up or not, because the man who does it has done it for nineteen years and would put them down in a thunderstorm.

Roll up, they call it. Not a match. No fixture, no teams, you turn up and whoever is there gets sorted into something. There is a shed with a kettle. There is a man who measures with a piece of string in a way that has been declared unofficial and that everybody accepts. There is a bench along the south side where the light stays longest and where the ones who are not playing sit and comment.

He was there most Tuesdays for eleven years.

He has driven past the green about forty times since, on the way to the tip and back, and there is a gap in the hedge where you can see the whole of it for about a second and a half if you look right, and he looks right every single time.

Two summers.

The reason he stopped is his own. What I want to talk about is what he is behaving as though were still true, because he is behaving as though he were still standing in a bad year, and he has not been standing in it for a long while.

Sit down on the bench with me, friend. Today I am talking to the one who did something a good way back, brought it to God straight and meant every syllable, and stopped going to the things he used to go to.

And before you brace for it: nobody here is setting you a pace. Not going is not a sin and this site will never call it one, and you will not find a timetable anywhere in this message.

Four verbs, all past, none of them yours

There is a psalm David wrote where he describes the whole of what happened to him in one sentence, and the useful thing about it is the grammar.

He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.Psalm 40:2

Count them. Brought up. Set. Established. Three actions, and the subject of every one of them is God, and every one of them is finished.

Now the word for the pit. It is a cistern, a hole dug for water, steep sided, and the point of it in Hebrew is that a man cannot get himself out of it. That is what makes it a pit rather than a ditch. And the miry clay under it means there is nothing to push off from, which is exactly what a bad year is like from the inside.

And then: set my feet upon a rock. A rock is the opposite of clay in every way that matters to a man standing on it. It does not move and it does not give.

You are standing on rock and you were lifted onto it, and you were never expected to climb out of a cistern by yourself. I am not offering you a nice reading. The written word puts three past tense verbs in God's hands in that one line, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it into a man driving past a green on his way to the tip.

Established my goings

Now the fourth thing, and this is the one that has your name on it.

Established my goings. The word is about steps. Making a man's walking firm. It is not about standing still on the rock in a grateful way; it is about the ordinary business of going about, of moving from one place to another.

Which means God's work on you did not stop at the getting out. He has been steadying the walking as well, and He has been doing it through two summers in which you have mostly walked between a house and a car and a tip.

You are not standing in the clay. That is the thing. You are standing on rock and behaving like a man in clay, and I do not say that as a rebuke, because a man who has been in a cistern goes on feeling the sides of it for a long time after somebody has lifted him out. That is not weakness, it is memory.

You are established in your going by God Himself, and you were brought out a long time before you stopped feeling the sides. Scripture puts the steadying in the same list as the lifting, and it is His Spirit, not a stronger week, who makes a man's steps firm on an ordinary Tuesday.