He Does Not Abandon Work He Started

He has started shortening his prayers, and he could not tell you exactly when that began.

Not consciously. He has just noticed himself getting to the point faster, and wrapping up sooner, and last Thursday he caught himself doing something he did not like at all: he said the word quickly. As in, Lord, quickly, just the thing about my sister.

Quickly. To God. As though there were a queue behind him.

He is forty-four and he has been a Christian since he was nineteen and he could not point to a single thing he has done wrong. He has not left. He has not fallen into anything. He tithes and he shows up and he prays for his sister every day, and none of that is the problem.

The problem is a picture that has grown in him over about six years, and it goes like this. There are people in his church who are alive. He watches them. They come out of services different. They have things happen. They cry at things and mean it and go home changed.

And there is him. Same room. Same songs. Nothing.

And somewhere in there he stopped thinking of himself as one of God's projects and started thinking of himself as one of God's old projects. Not abandoned exactly. Just further down. The way a builder has three jobs on and one of them is the one he goes to when the others are quiet.

So he says quickly. Because he has come to believe that God's attention is finite and better spent elsewhere, and that a man who does not respond well is a poor use of it.

The sentence Paul was confident about

Paul writes a line to a church he loved, and I want you to notice what he says he is confident about and what he does not mention at all.

Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.Philippians 1:6

There are two parties in that sentence and only one of them is doing anything. He began it. He performs it. The believer is the location of the work, not a partner in it and certainly not the guarantor of it.

And Paul's confidence is not in the Philippians. He does not say I am confident in you, and he does not say I am confident because of how you have been responding. He is confident in the One who started it, which means the confidence does not move when the person does.

You are a work God began, and the finishing of it was never contingent on how you have been coming out of services. That is not encouragement I am extending on His behalf; it is the exact ground Paul names for his own confidence in Philippians 1:6, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a first-century sentence and sets it beside a man saying quickly on a Thursday.

There is no mechanism for what you fear

Now let me get at the picture, because the picture is doing you real damage and it is built out of something that does not exist.

You are imagining God the way you would imagine a good manager with limited hours. Finite attention. Competing demands. A rational allocation of a scarce resource toward the people producing results.

There is no such thing. Not in God. The attention you are trying to be considerate about is not a scarce resource, and there is no queue behind you, and there is no ledger in which a warm person's Sunday takes something away from yours.

You have been apologizing for taking up a supply that has no bottom. Scripture says He counts the hairs on a head and does not lose track of a sparrow, which is not the arithmetic of a busy man, and the Holy Spirit is not divided across a room like a warm draft that reaches some seats and not others.

And here is the thing about the people you watch. I am not going to run them down to make you feel better, and I am not going to suggest their tears are shallow. Some of them are exactly what they look like. But you have been treating visible response as the measure God uses, and He has said out loud, more than once, that He does not measure by what shows.

A man who has prayed for his sister every day for six years while feeling nothing is not a poor use of anybody's attention. That is faithfulness under conditions that make faithfulness expensive.

You were never further down a list, and the list you are imagining has never been drawn up. The written word puts every believer in Christ on the same footing with no ranking underneath it, and the Holy Spirit is the deposit on that in a quiet man exactly as much as in a demonstrative one.