One Thing That Cannot Be Moved

Yvonne made the list on the back of an order of service, which she is not proud of, but it was what was in her hand.

Four years. The building, which everybody thought would be there forever and is now flats. The job, which was permanent, which is a word she has stopped using. Her marriage, which is not over and which is not what it was, and which she is not going to write about here except to say that it moved.

Her health, which was the thing she never had to think about.

Her mother's house, sold in November, which had been the address on every form she filled in from the age of five until she was thirty-one.

She sat in a service she was not really attending and she wrote them down on the back of the paper, and it came to six, and she looked at six things she would have described four years ago as fixed.

She is not in despair. That is not what this is and she would find it irritating if anybody assumed it. She is functioning very well, which is the family talent.

What she wants, and what she has not been able to say to anybody, is one thing that will not move. Not a promise about the future, which she has become extremely wary of. One thing, now, that she can put a hand on.

What got her was an old man at that same service who does the sound and has done for about forty years. She was leaving and he was coiling a cable and he said, not looking up, the way people say things when they are doing something else: I have watched this room empty out and fill up four times since 1987. Same room. I am not saying that helps. I am saying I am still here coiling this cable and so is He.

I am still here and so is He.

Yvonne stood at the back of a hall with a coat over her arm and had to say something about the weather, and she could not have explained it to anybody in that congregation.

And the sentence that arrived, standing there, had nothing to do with the six things.

She thought: I have been looking for something in my life that cannot be moved, and everything in my life can be moved, and a man coiling a cable has just told me where he has been standing for forty years.

Say the word right, before anything else

I want to be plain about what wealth means on this site, because the word is slippery and I would rather be clear than clever with a woman standing at the back of a hall with a coat over her arm.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a permanent contract, not an address on a form. A portion is the old table word for what is set down in front of somebody because they belong at that table, and Scripture takes that ordinary word and does something outrageous with it: God says of certain people that He Himself is their portion. That is the only sense the word carries here, and this is the article where that has to become something a person can put a hand on.

And let me be plain about what I am not going to do. I am not going to tell you that the six things were not really fixed, which would be clever and would help nobody, and I am not going to promise you that nothing else will move, because I have no authority to promise that and neither does anybody else. If you are genuinely short as well, that is real and deserves a real answer, and impossibleharvest.com in this same family is built for exactly that.

What I want to do is narrower. I want to find you the one thing, and I would rather the word of God found it, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed at where it is.

The reason he is not shaken is not where he is standing

Psalm sixteen has a verse in the middle of it that is built like an argument, and the order of the clauses is the whole thing.

I have set the LORD always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken.Psalm 16:8

I am not going to improve on that. The Holy Spirit has been carrying it to people with nothing left standing for three thousand years and it does not need anything from me.

But watch the word because, and watch which side of it the stability is on.

He does not say I shall not be shaken because my circumstances are stable. He does not say it because the building will still be there or because the job is permanent. He says it because He is at my right hand, and that is the entire load-bearing clause.

Which means the not-being-shaken is not a property of anything in the man's life. It is a consequence of a location, and the location is a Person standing beside him, and a Person standing beside somebody does not become less present when a building becomes flats.

You are not fragile and you are not faithless. You are somebody who has had six fixed points move in four years and is now, entirely reasonably, unable to call anything fixed, and the written word does not scold anybody for that. It moves the stability off the furniture, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between reading a verse and having something to put a hand on.

And here is what is true of you today, before you know one thing about the next four years. You have a portion and it does not move. His word says He is at my right hand, present tense, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a settled fact in a body rather than a beautiful line in a psalm.

What is actually fixed

Think about what got you at the back of that hall. It wasn't reassurance. He was not reassuring anybody, and he said so.

It was: I am not saying that helps, I am saying I am still here coiling this cable and so is He. It was a man who has watched the same room empty and fill four times refusing to pretend, and then telling you exactly where he has been standing the whole time. You were starving to be told the truth by somebody who was not going to tidy it, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as cynicism, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a person and not merely about them.

That is the honest thing under the six. It is not that you have stopped believing. It is that you have learned, correctly, from four years of evidence, that things described as fixed can move, and no seventh thing described as fixed is ever going to settle that, because the problem is not that you are short of things.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. There is one thing and it is not a thing. Jesus said heaven and earth would pass away and that His words would not, which is a sentence that deliberately puts the sky in the moving column, and He was at the back of that hall while the cable was being coiled.