Sawdust On The Bench

The plane comes back along the grain and a shaving lifts and curls off the edge of it, and there is that smell, and there is the fine stuff that has got into everything and will still be in his cuffs on Thursday.

He runs his hand flat along the board to feel whether it is true. Not to look. To feel. He has done it that way since he was nineteen and he could not tell you exactly what he is feeling for, only that his hand knows before his eye does.

He is making a drawer. It is for his daughter, who does not need a drawer and has not asked for one, and that is not the point of the drawer.

He has a radio out there and he listens to things while he works, and one evening a while back he watched a recording of a big meeting. Thousands of people. A man on a platform, and the whole room lifting, and something plainly happening that was not being manufactured. He watched the whole of it.

And I want to say this carefully, because it is the thing that most gets got wrong about men like him. He was not sneering. There was nothing in him that wanted to take that apart. He thought it was good, and he was glad of it, and he said so to himself out loud in the shed.

He switched it off, and he stood there with his hand on the bench, and he felt about a thousand miles away from that room.

Not left out, exactly. Just a different species, the way you can watch a documentary about deep sea fishing and think, that is real and that is fine and that is nothing at all to do with my week.

So he filed himself. Quietly, without deciding to, the way a man files himself. That sort of thing happens to other people. He has got a shed and a plane and a daughter who does not need a drawer.

Now here is what he has never once noticed, and it is the reason I am telling you any of this.

At about ten past four most afternoons, standing at that bench with the shavings coming off, he says something out loud in a completely ordinary voice. Same three or four words, every time, for twenty years. Right. You and me, then.

He is not praying. He would tell you he was not praying. He is just saying it, the way you do.

He has never once wondered who he is saying it to.

Read what was actually promised, not what you have seen

On the last night, in a room with eleven frightened men, Jesus makes a promise about the Holy Spirit. And it is worth reading slowly, because almost nobody reads what is actually in it.

And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.John 14:16-18

Now count what is in those three sentences.

Another Helper. Another one of the same kind, is what that word carries. Not a replacement of a lower order. The same sort of company they had been keeping for three years, walking about, eating with them, on the road with them.

To be with you forever. Not to visit. Not to be summoned. Forever, which is a word about staying.

He dwells with you. Dwells. That is a word about a house, not a hall.

I will not leave you as orphans. That is what the whole promise is answering. Not a shortage of power. A fear of being left on your own.

Read those together and see what the emphasis actually falls on. Company. Permanence. Nearness. A person who moves in.

You have been given a Helper of the same kind, to be with you forever, and forever is the word in the text. It is written that the Father gives another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, for He dwells with you and will be in you (John 14:16-17). The Holy Spirit was promised as company before He was ever promised as power.

I am not going to say one word against what you saw on that recording, and I am not going to compare it to anything, because it was real and it was good and God was in it. That is not the correction that is needed here.

The correction is much simpler than that. You were shown one room, and you took the whole of it as the picture, and then you measured your shed against a hall and concluded, sensibly, that these were different things.

They are not different things. They are the same Person in two different buildings, and He is not louder in one of them than the other.

You have the same Holy Spirit in a shed that a thousand people had in that hall. It is written that there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone (1 Corinthians 12:6), which puts the variation in the activity and never in the Person. The Holy Spirit is not distributed by the size of a room.

And there is one more thing I want to put down here, plainly, because it is a fear that lives in a lot of people and it is worth killing outright. He does not come and go according to how your week has been. He is not standing off from you because of Tuesday. The promise was forever and dwells, and neither of those words has a condition attached to it about your performance, your feelings, or what you did on Tuesday.

He has been in the shed the whole time. That is not a nice thought. That is what the sentence says.

You are not standing off from Him because of Tuesday, and no week of yours has ever moved Him. It is written, I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you (John 14:18), which is Jesus answering the fear of being left rather than a shortage of anything. The Holy Spirit has been at that bench through every ordinary week of the twenty years.