You Apologized for Answering

He gets to the hall forty minutes early because the urn takes thirty-five to come up, and nobody else in that building has ever wanted to know that.

Rows of eight. Two aisles. The wonky chair goes at the back where the short leg does not matter. Cups out, milk in a jug instead of the plastic bottle because it is nicer and costs nothing. He does this every Tuesday for a group he is not part of, led by somebody who is genuinely good at it, and in two years he has never been asked to say anything and has never once offered.

There was a room of his own in this building, ten years ago, on a Thursday. He taught it for six years. Then something happened that he has never had a tidy account of, and the numbers thinned, first by three, then by half, then down to the four who kept coming out of kindness, which was worse than the empty chairs. He finished the term properly, because he is that sort of man. He did not book the room for the autumn.

He has never said out loud what he concluded, but he has lived off it ever since, and it goes like this. It was a season. The season is over. The honest thing now is to be useful with the chairs.

This Tuesday the tea break runs long. A young woman comes to the urn with two cups and asks him a question about something the leader had said, and she asks it the way you ask a caretaker where the toilets are, which is to say without expecting much.

He answers it.

Ninety seconds, maybe less. No throat clearing, no preamble. He simply puts the thing in order for her the way he puts out chairs, one row at a time, and at the end of it she says oh, and then she says it again in a different voice.

And the room has gone quiet, because seven other people were listening and one of them has turned her chair round.

And you apologized.

You said sorry, I do go on, and you turned back to the urn and put the tap down harder than you meant to, and your ears were hot for the rest of the evening, and you stacked the chairs afterwards on your own and drove home the long way.

The room closed. The oil did not.

Let me say the honest thing first, because relief laid over an unnamed weight slides off it.

I do not know what happened in that room. I am not going to guess at it, and nothing in this message needs it settled, and nobody in it needs to be described. Whatever it was, it emptied a Thursday and it took something out of you that has not come back, and the leaving of it is not the subject here. What happened afterwards is.

What happened afterwards is that an absence got read as a verdict.

Wherefore I put thee in remembrance that thou stir up the gift of God, which is in thee by the putting on of my hands. For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.2 Timothy 1:6-7

Read the grammar before you read the encouragement. Which is in thee. Present tense, and stated as a fact rather than as a hope, to a young man who had gone quiet in a season when going quiet was the sensible thing to do.

The Greek behind "stir up" is a word about fire. It means to rekindle, to fan back into flame. And you cannot fan what is not there. The verb assumes coals. Paul is not telling Timothy to go and get something; he is telling him there is fire under the ash in that grate and it needs air, and the whole sentence collapses if the fire went out when the room did.

You are not a man whose season closed. 2 Timothy 1:6 says the gift is in thee, spoken over somebody in exactly your position, and the tense of it was never adjusted downward for a quiet decade, and it is the Holy Spirit and not this paragraph who makes a present-tense verb land on a man who has spent ten years filling an urn.

Now the older word, because it clears up the worst of the confusion. The Hebrew mashach, from which anointed comes, means to smear or to rub with oil. It is a domestic, hands-on word. Oil on a wound, oil on a shield, oil on a head. It never described a rank in the way the English word has come to. Nobody in that world was more anointed than his neighbor, in the way people say it now. Oil was put on, by a hand, for a purpose.

You have an anointing that is described as abiding rather than as awarded. Scripture says the anointing which ye have received of him abideth in you, in 1 John 2:27, and John writes that to an ordinary congregation and not to a tier within it, and the Spirit is the one who keeps that from being a compliment and makes it a description.

That is worth pausing on, because a good deal of the pain in the last ten years has come from a category error nobody corrected. If the anointing is a rank, then losing a room is a demotion, and a demotion has to be earned, and so a man goes back through six years looking for the fault. If it is oil poured for a purpose, then an empty room is a fact about a room.

What the emptying could not reach

Here is the thing the last decade has never once put to the test.

You were answering that question with something that was not technique. 1 Corinthians 12:11 says the same Spirit divides to every man severally as He will, so the distribution was His decision and not a reward for a good term, and the Spirit who did the dividing has not been quietly taking it back over a tea urn.

Nobody stacks chairs for two years in a building where they used to teach unless something is still alive. Bitterness leaves. Indifference leaves. Men who have genuinely finished with a thing find another Tuesday. Staying near it, week after week, doing the least visible job in the room, is not the behavior of a man whose fire is out. It is the behavior of a man standing as close to it as he thinks he is allowed.

You were given this, and God has not changed His mind about it. Romans 11:29 says the gifts and calling of God are without repentance, which in that older English means He does not change His mind and take them back, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that reach a man who assumed the withdrawal had already happened quietly some time around the autumn he did not book.

And notice what actually happened at the urn. Ninety seconds, no preparation, no notes, standing up, holding a tap. It worked. It worked on somebody who was not expecting anything, and the room turned round, and the only thing in the building that did not work was your own account of yourself.

You have the same voice you had on those Thursdays, and it has not thinned. His word says a sound mind is part of what was given, in that same verse in 2 Timothy, and a sound mind is exactly what put the answer in order for her in ninety seconds, and the Spirit is the one who has been keeping it in working order through ten years of silence.