What I Agreed To Out Loud

Bethel Chapel on Cade Road has a fellowship hall with four eight foot tables pushed into a square, and on Wednesday nights from seven until eight fifteen there are somewhere between nine and fourteen men sitting around it. Coffee in white foam cups. A box fan in the window in summer and a kerosene heater ticking in the corner in February. Marvin Teague leads it. Marvin is sixty eight, he was the principal at the county high school for nineteen years, and he is one of the kindest men in three townships. That matters to this story, so hold onto it.

Dean Vickers is forty seven and drives a rock truck for the county road department. He has been coming on Wednesdays for six years. He sits at the corner where the tables do not quite meet, because that is where his chair was the first night and nobody has moved it since.

At about ten after eight, with the study finished and the notebooks closing, Marvin took his glasses off and set them on the table, which is what he does when he is about to say something he has been carrying all week.

"Before we pray," he said. "I would like every man here to commit to one conversation before we meet again. One person. About the Lord. Who is in?"

And it went around the square. Yes. Yes. Amen. I am in. Yes.

Dean heard his own voice say it. "Yeah, I am in."

He was a little surprised by the sound of it, the way you are surprised to hear yourself on a recording.

Now he is in his truck. The rain started sometime during the closing prayer and it is coming down steady on the windshield, and he has not turned the wipers on because he has not started the engine. There are two cars left in the gravel lot and one of them is Marvin's. The porch bulb over the fellowship hall door is that yellow color that only exists over a church door.

On the way out he had it worked out. He would say something to Ronnie at the scale house Thursday. Ronnie is at that little window eleven hours a day and they have talked about everything else on this earth for nine years. And now Dean is sitting here picturing Ronnie's face at the exact moment he starts, and the whole plan comes apart in his chest like wet paper.

He does not know how to do the thing he just promised. He has never known how. He is forty seven years old and he has agreed out loud, in a church, to something he never wanted to promise, and he cannot think of one honest way out of it.

He turns the keys over in his hand and thinks the sentence that has been waiting for him since ten after eight.

I lied in a church.

To his own master

I want to say something about Marvin before I say anything else, because the easy move here is to make him the villain and he is not one.

Marvin loves God. Marvin has loved those men for years, and he took his glasses off because he was nervous, and what came out of him at ten after eight was a good man reaching for the only handle he knew. Nearly every demand that has ever landed on you arrived through somebody like that. It did not come from a cynic. It came wrapped in mission language, from a person who meant it, and that is exactly why it stuck to you and why you have never been able to shake it off.

But look what Paul does with a question like that.

Who art thou that judgest another man's servant? to his own master he standeth or falleth. Yea, he shall be holden up: for God is able to make him stand.Romans 14:4

You are somebody else's servant entirely, and it was settled whose you are a long while before that room ever went around the table. I am not saying that to get you out of anything. Romans 14:4 is written down in a letter, in ink, and it does not carry an exception for Wednesday nights or for men who mean well. And the Holy Spirit does not raise His voice about this one. He just quietly carries the desk out of the room while you are sitting there.

Read the second half of it. He shall be holden up. Not he had better hold on. Not he will manage if he tries. Held up, by somebody else, on purpose.

You were made His own, and you answer to Him, and that is not a loophole in the arrangement, that is the whole arrangement. The written word puts it in Romans 14:4 without a hedge anywhere in the sentence. What the Spirit adds, at eight forty on a rainy night in a truck with the wipers off, is that the servant in that verse has your name.

What the yes actually cost

The yes cost him a night. That is what it cost. And I am not going to pretend that is nothing, because a man sitting in a lot in the rain calling himself a liar is not having nothing happen to him.

But notice what the yes did not do. It did not transfer him. He did not change hands at ten after eight. No man around that table became the one he stands or falls to, and Marvin would be horrified to hear it put that way, because Marvin does not want to be anybody's master either.

Here is the part where I could ruin this, and I am not going to. I could hand you a smaller version of the same thing. Just be available. Just pray for one person this week. Just look for an opening. That is the same desk with a shorter leg, and you would carry it home and set it up in the same room, and by Sunday night you would be behind on it.

You have no quota, no smaller quota, and nothing on any list anywhere with your name written next to a number. That is not my opinion about mission. Romans 14:4 asks who any of us think we are to stand over another man's servant, and the written word does not answer the question, it dismisses it. And the Spirit is not standing behind that dismissed question waiting to ask it again in a gentler voice.

What Jesus actually said in Matthew 5:14, on a hillside, over people who had done nothing yet, was a flat statement about what they were. Not a promise He collected. Not a card they signed. A fact He spoke over them before one of them had a story to tell about it.

It is already finished, and it was finished by Him at a table nobody in that fellowship hall was sitting at. Matthew 5:14 is an indicative and Romans 14:4 hands the standing to the Master, and both of those are written and neither of them is up for a vote. The Spirit does not make that true tonight. He agrees with it tonight, out loud, in you.