He looks around that room and does the arithmetic, and it always comes out the same.
Everybody else is fine.
Not perfect, he is not stupid, and he would tell you that everybody has something. But when he actually looks at the individual faces, one at a time, he cannot picture any of them carrying what he is carrying.
The woman at the end of the second row: no. The couple who run the Wednesday thing: no. The man who does the reading: no.
He is not being naive. He is doing what everybody does, which is to compare the whole of his own inside with the outside of every other person in the room, and the result of that arithmetic is always the same and it is always wrong.
Eleven years of sitting in a warm building feeling like the one contaminated thing in it.
And the effect is not guilt. It is more particular than guilt. It is a kind of courtesy. He does not want to bring it in here, among these people, who are doing so well.
So he takes it in and takes it out again, every week, in his coat.
So let me ask you, my friend.
Who do you imagine walked in there with nothing?
The text records it happening together
There is a line in Acts that I find enormously steadying, and it is not a dramatic verse and nobody preaches it.
Luke is describing what happened in Ephesus, which was a large and complicated city, and this is one sentence in the middle of a longer account.
Many of those who believed now came and openly confessed what they had done.Acts 19:18
Read the two words that carry it. Many, and came.
Not one person. Many, and they came, which is a plural verb about people moving in the same direction at the same time, having each decided separately that they were going to say something out loud.
Acts 19 records a whole town's worth of believers saying out loud what they had been doing, and the Spirit who had been moving through that city in an extraordinary way was in that plural moment, so the room you sit in on a Sunday has never once been full of people who arrived with nothing.
And notice the tense of it: what they had done. Past. These are believers. This is not their conversion; Luke has already covered that. These are people who were already in, and who had things.
Now let me be careful, because I am not about to send anybody anywhere.
I am not telling you to disclose anything in a room, to any group, or under any arrangement. Nothing here asks that, in any direction, and a man who reads this and stands up somewhere on Sunday has misheard me completely.
I am telling you your arithmetic is wrong, and the text is the evidence.
Acts 19 has many rather than one, and the Spirit was moving through all of them at once, which means the courtesy that keeps you carrying it out to the car every week is built on a picture of that room that has never been accurate.
You are not the one contaminated thing in a clean building. You are one of the many, in a room of coats.
Now the turn, and it is a correction of a guess.
Stop believing the arithmetic.
You have compared your inside with everybody's outside for eleven years, and that sum has never once been solvable, and you have been treating its answer as a fact about the room. Acts 19 has a whole town saying out loud what they had done, openly, to each other, and the Spirit was in that room while they did it.
You are not being asked to announce anything, and I want that clear, because a man in your state can hear an instruction where there is only an invitation.
Acts 19 says many of those who believed came and openly said what they had done, and the Spirit was moving through the lot of them, so the assumption that you are the only one has never had anything holding it up but a bad calculation.
Say it once, to one person, or into an empty room. Not to a gathering. One.
Declare this over yourself
Say these where you can hear yourself. Know what holds them up. This authority is not yours by nature, it is Christ's, and in Christ it has been given to you, so you speak as one representing the King. And you speak under His will, never over it. However He answers, and in whatever way He comes, the outcome is His.
- Loneliness, you are a guess about other people and you were never information. Acts 19 says many of those who believed came and openly confessed what they had done, and many is a plural and it is the whole point of the verse.
- Courtesy that carries it out to the car every week so as not to bring it in among people who are doing so well, you have run eleven years on a bad calculation, and in the name of Jesus you are corrected. The Spirit was moving through that entire city at once and never through one man only.
- Lord, Acts 19 says what they had done, in the past tense, about people who were already believers and already in. I am saying it once tonight to one person or to an empty car, and I am one of the many in a room full of coats.
Acts 19:18
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