Never Heard a Voice, Never Left

They do a testimony night twice a year and it is a good night. Nobody should hear a word against it.

A woman stands up and tells about a scan and a consultant who could not account for it. A young lad tells about a car park in Doncaster where he heard something say his name and he has not been the same since. Somebody's mother talks about a dream and half the room is in bits. It is warm and it is honest and the tea afterwards goes on for an hour.

He is at the back on the sound desk, the way he has been at the back on the sound desk since the desk had actual faders on it. Sixty two. Forty one years in that building. He has never missed a testimony night and he has never once been in one.

Afterwards he is stacking chairs, eight to a stack, the way he does, and a lad in his twenties comes over with two mugs and gives him one and says, friendly as anything, "So what's your story then?"

And he says, "Oh, I've just always been here."

And the lad says, "Ah, nice," and means it kindly, and drifts off toward the woman with the scan, because that is where the story is, and quite right too.

He finishes the chairs. He does the fire door check because it is his week. He turns the boiler down and locks up and sits in the car in the empty car park with the keys in his hand for a bit before he starts it.

Forty one years. He has never heard a voice. He has never seen a thing he could not explain. He has never had a dream worth telling. He did not get a moment in a car park in Doncaster or anywhere else. There has been no scan, no consultant, nothing.

What he has is this: he has been there. He was there the year his father died and he did the sound that Sunday with the coffin in the church because he did not know what else to do with himself. He has driven eleven people to the crematorium in his own car. He knows where the fuse box is. He gave up smoking on a Tuesday in 1996 and never said anything to anybody about how, because he did not think it counted.

And here is the thing that keeps him in the car park, and it is not sadness. It is closer to fear.

If a man goes forty one years and nothing ever happens, was he ever actually in it? Or has he just been very good staff?

You have sat in that car park. You have listened to somebody else's Doncaster and been genuinely glad for them and then found something cold underneath the gladness that you would not say out loud to a single person alive.

The sentence Jesus said with His scars still showing

There is a moment in John that I do not think we have ever fully taken in.

Thomas has said he will not believe without the evidence, and the evidence arrives. Jesus stands in the room and offers him His hands. It is the single most spectacular confirmation any human being has ever been handed, and Thomas goes down and says my Lord and my God.

And then Jesus, standing there with the marks still visible, turns His head. He looks past Thomas. And He says this:

Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.John 20:29

Look at the timing of it. At the exact moment when a sighting is being handed over, He pronounces a blessing on the people who are never going to get one. Not a consolation. Not a note of apology for the ones at the back. A blessing, spoken out loud, over a category of people He could already see coming.

He does not say they are second. He does not say a sighting is being arranged for them later. He calls them blessed as they are, with nothing in their hands.

That is you and I am not softening it into a compliment. You are inside a blessing that Jesus spoke on purpose, in advance, in John 20:29, over people with exactly your file, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept you believing for forty one years without ever once giving you a story to tell about it.

The roll of honor ends with people who got nothing

Then there is the chapter everybody quotes for the miracles, and almost nobody reads to the end.

Hebrews eleven runs through it: shut the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, turned armies to flight, women received their dead raised to life again. Wonderful. And then, halfway down, the writer says "and others", and the tone changes completely, and it goes on to people who were sawn asunder and wandered in sheepskins and lived in dens and caves. And then this:

And these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise.Hebrews 11:39

Read that again. The same chapter. The same roll of honor. The same phrase, a good report. And their file has nothing in it that a testimony night could use.

The world was not worthy of them, it says. Not the world was waiting for their moment. Not their moment was coming. The record simply honors them for the believing, and says plainly that the thing they were believing for did not arrive in their lifetime, and puts them on the same list as the lions and the fire without a word of apology.

You are on a list you never applied for. Scripture ran the roll and put the ones who received nothing visible alongside the ones who shut lions' mouths, and His Spirit is the one who has been holding you on it since you were twenty one.

What has actually been in your hands

So let us do some arithmetic, because I think the wrong column has been counted.

Forty one years without a voice. And forty one years without leaving.

Now, which of those two is the remarkable one? Because I have been around long enough to tell you that men leave. Men leave over a great deal less than nothing happening for four decades. Men leave over a sermon they did not like, over a rota, over one bad year. And here is a man who got no voice, no dream, no car park, nothing, and stayed, and did the sound at his own father's funeral, and drove eleven people to a crematorium in his own car.

That is not the absence of evidence. That is evidence in a form nobody claps for.

And I want to be careful here, because this is not me telling you to be proud of your attendance. The staying was not your achievement any more than the woman's scan was hers. Scripture says you are kept by the power of God through faith, kept, a word about somebody else's grip on you. What your forty one years is evidence of is not your loyalty. It is His keeping, and it has been going on in plain sight the whole time in a form so ordinary that nobody thought to name it.

Right now, as you read, you are holding forty one years of that keeping, and I did not invent this to make you feel better; 1 Peter 1:5 is where the word kept comes from, and the Spirit of God has been doing the keeping quietly, in a man locking up a building on a wet Sunday night.