The Man Who Stacks The Chairs

Twenty past ten on a Saturday, and the hall smells like bacon and burnt toast and industrial coffee, which is one of the great smells of the Christian life and nobody says so.

Thirty men. Somebody's brother-in-law who came for the food and stayed for the talking. Two teenagers who have eaten more than everyone else combined. An older man doing his story about the boat, with the hand movements, which everyone has decided to enjoy again.

And down the far end, a man taking chairs off tables and stacking them eight high along the wall.

He started while the speaker was still finishing. Not to be helpful in a demonstrative way. He just cannot sit still at the end of a thing, and somebody has to, and he is nearest.

Seventeen years he has been in that church. Seventeen. He has been to every men's breakfast for eleven of them. He has never been on a team, never been on a rotation, never been asked to lead anything, pray anything, run anything or start anything. Not once. Not even the sort of asking where somebody says we should get you involved in something and then never does.

He does not resent it. That is the strange part, and it is worth saying plainly. He genuinely does not. But somewhere along the way he did the sum that anybody would do, and he came out with an answer, and the answer was: there must be nothing here to ask for.

Let me get one thing out of the way

Before anything else, so you can read the rest with your shoulders down.

I am not going to tell you what your gift is. Not directly, not by describing you so closely that you take it as a diagnosis, and not with a list at the end you can measure yourself against until something matches. No questionnaire. No nicer questionnaire either.

That is not me hedging. The chapter every one of us reaches for when a man asks what am I for does not answer that question, and the moment you see that it does not, seventeen years stop meaning what you thought they meant.

You are not sitting in a waiting room, and there is no envelope with your name on it that somebody forgot to open. That is not my encouragement talking. That is what the word actually says about how this works, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a man to be catalogued before He would use him.

The verse that gets skipped

Everybody quotes verse 18. I want to go back seven verses, because verse 11 is where the deciding happens and almost nobody stops there.

But all these worketh that one and the selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will.1 Corinthians 12:11

Sit with the verbs.

Worketh. Present, ongoing, active. Dividing. Not divided once at the beginning of church history and then left to run. Dividing.

To every man severally. Which is an old way of saying one at a time, individually, by name, with nobody handled in a batch.

As He will. Not as the need arises. Not as the vacancy appears. Not as the man volunteers. As He wills.

You were dealt with individually by the Holy Spirit Himself, and the deciding about you was not left to a room of good people with a clipboard. I am not stretching that sentence. It says severally in 1 Corinthians 12:11, and it says as He wills, and the Spirit who is described there is the same Spirit sitting with you while you read this line.

Which means the thing a man does at the end of a breakfast, the thing so ordinary that nobody has ever thought to name it, was never assigned by default.

What the foot actually said

Paul knew somebody would push back, so he puts the objection in the text himself.

If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body?1 Corinthians 12:15

Read what the foot is complaining about. It is not saying I do nothing. Feet do a great deal. It is saying I am not the other one, so I must not really be in.

That is the exact sum a man does in a hall with a stack of chairs. Not I contribute nothing. He contributes constantly. It is nobody has ever asked me, therefore there must be nothing to ask about.

Paul's answer is not comfort. It is a flat correction. Is it therefore not of the body. No. It is not therefore anything. The conclusion does not follow, and it never did.

You have been drawing a conclusion about yourself from a silence, and the word of God puts that exact conclusion in writing in order to overturn it. He wrote the objection down so a man could hear it out loud and recognize the voice, and the Spirit who inspired that sentence is not standing behind you agreeing with the arithmetic.

Being placed is not the same as being picked

Here is the swap, and once you see it you cannot unsee it.

Being picked is a human transaction. Somebody notices, somebody asks, somebody puts your name in a box. It is a good thing when it happens and it is a genuinely mixed thing, because it depends on who is looking and how loud you are and whether you were in the room the week the list was made.

Being placed is something else entirely, and it has already happened to you.

But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him.1 Corinthians 12:18

Set. Past tense. Done. Every one of them. As it pleased Him.

You may go your whole life without being picked. Plenty of faithful men have. That is a comment on the people holding the clipboard and it is not a comment on you, and it has no bearing whatever on the sentence above.

You were set in this body by God, it pleased Him to do it, and no man's oversight has ever been able to reach that decision or revise it. That is the word's own language, not mine, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line like that and makes it sit in a man's chest as fact rather than as a nice idea.

And this is not you being handed a grievance about anybody. The men in that hall are good men who are busy. Nobody wronged him. The point is that the thing he wanted them to tell him was never theirs to say.