The Gift Did Not Hand In Its Keys

There were four keys on the ring and he knew all of them by feel in the dark.

The cupboard with the table tennis net that never sat straight. The side door that had to be lifted before it would turn. The hall. The little kitchen with the urn in it that took forty minutes and so had to be switched on before anybody arrived, which is the sort of thing only the person who does the job actually knows.

Friday nights. Eleven years of them. Thirty or so lads and girls who would not have gone anywhere else on a Friday, and a man who was not clever and was not funny and could not play the guitar particularly well, but who was in that hall at half past six every single week with the urn already on.

Then there was the thing that went wrong.

It does not matter here what it was. It mattered enormously at the time. It was known about by the Sunday, and there was a meeting, and there were people in that meeting who handled it well and people who did not, which is what happens in meetings. He stepped down. That part was his own decision and he still thinks it was the right one.

He put the four keys on the desk. He remembers the sound they made on the wood.

And then he did something nobody asked him to do and nobody noticed him doing, which is the part this is actually about.

He decided that the gift had been on the ring.

Not the role. The role was on the ring, obviously, and the role was rightly handed over. But somewhere in that week he quietly concluded that whatever it was in him that made a Friday night work, whatever it was that let a fifteen year old tell him something they had not told anybody else, had been given back along with the key to the urn cupboard. Withdrawn. Taken off him. Confiscated by God as a consequence.

That was eight years ago. He sits at the back now. He leaves during the last song so as not to have to talk to anyone in the doorway.

And two months ago the boy from three doors down knocked and asked if he knew how to change a string, and he did it in the kitchen in about four minutes, and the boy stayed for an hour, and the man could not sleep that night and did not let himself think about why.

Now that ring of keys is yours, so hold it a second.

You handed back a role. Everybody agrees you handed back a role.

Nobody in heaven or on earth ever asked you for the other thing, and nobody ever took it.

A role is a chair. A gift is not.

Paul writes into a church that had turned this exact confusion into a full sport, and he does it with one sentence that goes off like a small explosion in the middle of their league table.

But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal.1 Corinthians 12:7

Three things sit in that line, and each of them takes a leg off the thing you have been standing on for eight years.

It is a manifestation of the Spirit, which makes God the source and not the committee. It is given to every man, which means it arrives with people rather than with positions, and it rules out any ranking of one believer above another, forever. And it is to profit withal, which is Elizabethan English for something usable, aimed outward, for other people's good.

There is no clause about tenure. There is no clause about a hall.

You are holding a live thing, not a memory of one. Scripture places the manifestation of the Spirit inside a person rather than inside a role, 1 Corinthians 12:7, and a thing the Holy Spirit put in a man does not fall out of him when a rota changes.

That word anointing has taken a lot of damage. People use it as a rank, or a temperature, or a way of sorting believers into those who have more of God and those who have less. None of that is in the text and all of it is poison. Nobody reading this is further up a ladder than anybody else reading this, because there is no ladder, and a man at the back of a hall on a Sunday morning is not standing on a lower rung than the man at the front.

You were never demoted, because there was never a rank to be demoted from. His word says there are diversities of gifts but the same Spirit, and diversity is not hierarchy, and the Spirit who distributes them has never once run a league table.

What the keys were actually for

Consider what was truly on that ring.

The keys opened a building. They also organized your Friday, gave you a title people could use at the door, made you findable, and told you where to point the thing that was in you. That is a genuine service and it is not nothing. A role is a chair: it is where a gift sits down, and a chair is useful, and losing one is a real loss worth grieving.

But nobody has ever confused a chair with the person sitting in it, except in this one situation, where almost everybody does.

Here is the test, and it took four minutes in a kitchen. A boy knocked on a door with a broken string and left an hour later, and something happened in that hour that had nothing to do with the guitar. Nobody had a key. Nobody had a title. There was no hall, no urn, no rota, no meeting. The thing worked anyway, because the thing was never plugged into the building.

You have been carrying this for eight years without noticing. Scripture says the gifts and calling of God are without repentance, meaning God does not change His mind about what He put in a person, and it is His Spirit and not a committee who has been keeping it warm through every one of those Sundays at the back.

There is something else, and it needs saying plainly. This is not a campaign to get the hall back.

Nothing here is asking for a platform, a rota, a title, or a conversation with anybody about what happened eight years ago. The step is smaller and quieter than that, and quieter is not a demotion either. The gift was made for people, and people are not only found in halls. There are three doors down. There is a nephew. There is somebody at your work whose son has gone off the rails and who has nobody to say it to.

You are already useful today, in the clothes you have on. The written word says as every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, and it puts no venue in that sentence at all, and the Holy Spirit is the one who arranges the knock on the door.