In His Own Time, and He Has Not Said

It has been every week since about February and it comes in three shapes.

The first is the man after the service who says, not really as a question, that things are certainly moving, and waits. The second is the woman who sends him links, four or five a month, always with the same short message. The third and hardest is the couple who asked him directly in his office whether they should be making the decisions they are making, about a house, given everything.

He said the true thing to the couple. Nobody knows, and you should buy the house.

He has watched the shape of the room after he says it. He is not imagining it. There is a specific deflation, and underneath the deflation there is something else that he has come to recognize, which is a small doubt about him. Not about his character. About whether he is really engaged with what everybody else can plainly see.

He is fifty. He has been in this church for eleven years and he loves these people.

Two of them have left, quietly, in the last year, and are now somewhere with a man who does give them the answer. He does not think they left over this and he is not certain they did not.

What is wearing on him is not the pressure. It is that refusing to guess has begun to look, from the pew, like a lack of faith, and he does not know how to say the true thing in a way that does not sound like less than it is.

Sit down in the office. There is a sentence that lets you refuse without evading, and it is a very large sentence.

He will display it at the proper time

Here it is, and notice that it is not a shrug. It is a coronation.

He who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, will display it at the proper time.1 Timothy 6:15

Read what the timing is attached to. Not to a lack of information. To sovereignty. The reason the day is not on offer is that the One who holds it is the blessed and only Sovereign, and He will display it at the time He judges proper.

That is a completely different thing from saying nobody knows. Nobody knows sounds like an absence. This sounds like a throne.

You have something enormous to say rather than something small. 1 Timothy 6:15 puts the timing inside a description of the King of kings, and the Spirit inspired it in that register precisely so that restraint would not sound like a deficiency.

And there is a pastoral use for that in your own building. When the man after the service says things are certainly moving, the answer is not merely I do not know. The answer is that the day belongs to the King of kings and He will display it at the proper time, which is a sentence somebody can be glad about rather than deflated by.

Why refusing looks like less

Now the deflation, because it needs understanding rather than resenting.

What that man wants, and what the woman with the links wants, is not information. It is significance. A sense that what is happening around them means something, and that they are inside a story rather than in an ordinary year.

That is a legitimate hunger and it is being fed badly by other people. When it is refused in that form, they experience it as being handed nothing, because they cannot yet see that something else is on the table.

So do not only refuse. Refuse and then supply. The story they are looking for is real: Christ is King, the world is His, He is not absent, and He will display the day when He judges it proper. That is a bigger frame than the one they are being handed and it does not require a headline to sustain it.

And it has the advantage of being true next year as well. The frame they are currently being offered has to be renewed constantly, because it is built out of events, and events go stale, and the man supplying it will be back in eighteen months with fresh material because he has to be. What is written does not need restocking, and the Spirit is not dependent on the news cycle to keep a congregation awake.

You are not withholding from them. Nothing written anywhere requires a pastor to supply what God has not, and the Spirit is the one who satisfies the hunger underneath that question rather than a briefing about events.

The two who left

Here is the hard part, and it needs saying honestly.

Two people left and you do not know why. That is going to stay unresolved, and the temptation is to let it change what you say, in small ways, over years, so that fewer people are deflated.

That is how a good man ends up guessing.

The cost of not guessing is real and you are paying it. Some people will always go where the answers are, and the man they have gone to is not lying to them on purpose, and he will be wrong, and they will come back or they will not.

You are not required to hold everybody. Nothing written anywhere makes retention the test of a ministry, and the Spirit is not asking you to say more than God said in order to keep two people in a building.

And there is a version of this that has to be named because it is the one that gets good men. Nobody decides to start guessing. What happens is that a man begins to lean, very slightly, in the direction that produces less deflation. He adds a note of gravity here, allows an implication to stand there, does not correct something a visiting speaker said, and eleven years later he is somewhere he never chose to be. The way that is prevented is not vigilance. It is saying the true sentence out loud, in its full size, every single time, so that there is nothing to lean away from.