Ten Past Four, and the Same Tightness

Tom got the raise in June, and he was awake at ten past four on the second of July with the exact same band across his chest that he had had in March.

He had genuinely expected it to work. That is the part he finds embarrassing. Not consciously, not as a plan, but somewhere underneath there had been an arrangement in which the number went up and the four o'clock stopped, and he had been living toward that for about two years.

The number went up. The four o'clock did not stop.

Nothing else is wrong. He wants that on the record because it makes the whole thing worse. His wife is well. The car is fine. There was a stretch three years ago that was genuinely bad, with a redundancy in it and eleven months of doing sums, and that is over and has been over for a long time.

And at ten past four, on and off, four or five nights out of ten, he lies in the dark with a band across the chest and the same specific sensation of being about to be found out.

He has told nobody. He has particularly not told his wife, because she would be kind about it and being handled is worse.

What got him was his own son, who is nineteen and home for the summer and who is not, historically, an observant boy. Tom was making coffee at about half five one morning and the lad came down for water and stopped in the doorway and said: dad. Are you up again? You've got everything you were trying to get. What's still after you?

You've got everything you were trying to get. What's still after you.

Tom stood in his own kitchen at half five in the morning with the kettle going and could not answer his son, and he could not have explained it to anybody at work.

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

He thought: I have been trying to buy my way out of four in the morning, and it turns out four in the morning does not take that.

Let me say the word properly first

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 man standing at a kettle at half five.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a salary, not a number that finally lets you sleep. 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 startling with it: God says of certain people that He Himself is their portion. That is the only sense the word carries here.

And this article is written for one particular reader, so let me be exact. It is for the man who has enough and cannot feel it. If you are genuinely short, if the number really is the problem and the four o'clock is telling you the truth, then nothing on this page is asking you to be content with that, and any article that did would deserve to be shut. Real lack is real and it deserves a real answer, and impossibleharvest.com in this same family is built for exactly that. What I want to look at is a band across the chest on a good July, and I would rather the word of God did the looking, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed.

Learned, which means it was not automatic

Paul writes one of the most quoted sentences in the Bible and almost nobody quotes the sentence in front of it, which is the one that matters.

Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.Philippians 4:11-13

Read the word learned. Twice. He uses it twice in three sentences, and a man does not learn something he was born knowing.

And read the other thing nobody notices. He says he learned how to abound. Not just how to be brought low. Abounding is on his list of things that had to be learned, which means it is a skill and not a reward, and it means the man who wrote it had been in a good season and found it did not automatically settle him either.

You are not a weak man for the July. You are somebody whose body did eleven months of hard arithmetic three years ago and was never told it could stop, and the written word does not scold anybody for that. It says the settling is learned, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the teaching in a body rather than in a theory.

And here is what is true of you this morning, before you know one thing about next year. You have today, and the word says He strengthens the man in the plenty and in the need alike, and His Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it into a chest at ten past four.

What four in the morning is actually asking

Think about what got you at that kettle. It wasn't the question. You've been asked worse questions at work.

It was: what's still after you. It was a nineteen year old seeing straight through the arrangement in about four seconds. You were starving to be asked that by somebody who was not going to manage you afterward, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as weakness, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a person and not merely about them.

That is the honest thing under the four o'clock. The chest is not asking about salary. It is asking whether you are about to be found out, and a raise cannot answer that question, because the question was never financial, which is exactly why June did nothing.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you today. You were never on trial. God is not running an inspection you are about to fail. Jesus called men to Himself who had all been publicly wrong about something, and He did the calling before any of them had straightened it out, and He was in that kitchen at half five before the kettle boiled.