Sixty-One Messages And A Goal I Missed

Saturday morning, the far pitch, the one with the slope on it, and there are about thirty grown adults along the touchline in coats that were not built for this.

Somebody's grandad has brought a folding chair and a flask. Two dads are having the referee conversation they have every week. A woman is shouting instructions to a nine year old who has never once heard a single word of them. It smells of wet grass and coffee out of a lid, and it is genuinely one of the good hours of the week.

Rosa is standing in the middle of all that, looking at her phone.

Sixty-one messages. It started on Tuesday. It is the same question it always is, the one that comes round every so often in every group she has ever been in, and by Wednesday night it had gone from a question to a position, and by Thursday there were two positions, and people she likes have been typing paragraphs at each other for four days.

She has read every one of them. She has typed and deleted three replies. And underneath all of it, unhelpfully, is the thing she actually came in with on Tuesday morning, which was that something good had happened and she wanted to say thank you to God about it before she said anything to anybody else. That was the whole plan. Thirty seconds and a kettle.

She has not said it. Four days and she has not said it, because somewhere in the middle of paragraph nineteen she picked up an idea she cannot put down: that she should probably get this straight first.

Then the touchline goes up. All of it, at once, thirty coats roaring. And Rosa looks up half a second late at her own boy running back to the halfway line with his arms out, and she knows exactly what she has just missed and why.

You have been standing on that touchline.

The man who could have settled it and would not

There is a chapter in Romans where Paul has a disputed practice in front of him, a real one, with real feeling on both sides and people at each other about it in an actual congregation. And Paul has apostolic authority. He can end this in one line.

Watch what he does with it.

One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. The one who observes the day, observes it in honour of the Lord.Romans 14:5-6

He does not rule. He has the pen, he has the standing, and he declines. And then he does the thing that changes the whole shape of the room: he goes underneath the question, finds what the person is actually doing down there, and names it. Unto the Lord.

That phrase is the load-bearing beam in the whole chapter. Whatever is happening on the surface, Paul says, there is a person down here honoring God, and that is the thing he is going to talk about.

So take this straight, because it is what the chapter says and not what I would like it to say. You are free to honor God today with the question still open, and your standing with Him is not sitting in a line behind a conclusion. Romans 14:6 puts the weight on unto the Lord rather than on the ruling, and the Holy Spirit is the One who has been keeping that little thank you alive in you since Tuesday morning.

Nothing is being decided here

Let me be plain about what this article is and is not, because enough of the other thing has already been handed over.

You are not being handed a verdict here, in this paragraph or in a later one or by implication. This site does not settle that argument, and it will not do it with a warm sentence that turns out to have a ruling folded inside it. What is written puts the weight on unto the Lord, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a page like this from becoming the thing it is declining to be. If you came here to find out who is right, you are going to leave without it, and that is on purpose and it is not evasion. It is because the thing that has been taken from you is not information. It is four days of your own gratitude, and no ruling in the world gives that back.

Nothing is being asked of you here either. Not a decision, not a position, not a thing to do about any of it.

Honor was never held up by a verdict

Here is the width of it, and Paul writes it in the plainest sentence he owns.

And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God through him.Colossians 3:17

Whatever you do. In word or deed. Everything.

That is not a loophole for people who have not worked out the hard question. That is the actual size of the door. A kettle, a Saturday morning, thirty seconds at the sink, a thank you said out loud in a kitchen with nobody in it.

You have that door standing wide open in front of you at this hour, and it does not have a waiting room attached. Colossians 3:17 says everything, in the name of the Lord Jesus, and the Holy Spirit is the One carrying the ordinary thing you do today up to where it was always going.

And here is what the first of a thing has always been about, underneath every argument anybody has ever had over it. Bringing God the first of something is not a calculation. It is an acknowledgment. It says out loud who you think it came from, before anybody else hears about it, before the day gets its hands on it. That is available to you this morning, in whatever you have, and it does not need a ruling to be genuine.