Rafters And No Roof

You can see it from the kitchen window, which is the whole trouble.

Nine rafters up. Good ones, oak, cut and set by a man who knew what he was doing and a man who did not, over eleven Saturdays. Purlins on. And then sky, all the way through, so that when it rains you can stand in that barn and get wet exactly as fast as you would outside.

Two years of that. There is grass growing in the corner where the floor was going to be.

He started it because he could not stop thinking about it. That is the honest account and he has never given a better one. A barn nobody used, four hundred yards from a village that had lost its hall, and a picture in his head that would not leave him alone for a whole winter, of that place full of people on a Tuesday night.

He told three men about it and all three said yes. And they meant it. One of them is still apologizing about it in the shop, eighteen months later, which is worse than if he never mentioned it.

Then his knee, which was always going to be a problem eventually and became one earlier than expected. Then a bad year for everybody around here. Then the price of steel sheet, which he still checks sometimes for no reason.

The sentence comes at the kitchen window, most mornings, with the kettle on. Not I wish we had finished. It is: God gave me a picture and I could not carry it.

You know that sentence. It might not be a barn. It might be a promise you made in a hospital, or a work you were sure about, or a picture in your head that would not leave you alone one winter and has been sitting there roofless ever since.

Whose job the doing was

There is a short verse at the end of a letter, and it is the whole of what I have for you this morning, and it has exactly two halves.

Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it.1 Thessalonians 5:24

Half one: He calls. Nobody has much trouble with that half. A picture you could not shake for a winter, three men who all said yes, a barn nobody used four hundred yards from a village with no hall. That was not a hobby and you know it.

Half two: who also will do it. And that is the half a man quietly removes about a week after the calling arrives, because it sounds too easy, and because he wants to be useful, and because being useful is the only way most of us know how to be loved.

You are inside a work that the God who called you took responsibility for doing, and He did not transfer that responsibility to your knee. That is what the written word says and not a soft reading I have chosen for a hard yard, and the Holy Spirit who kept that picture in front of you all winter is the evidence that the calling was never yours to execute.

Watch what that does to the accounting you do at the kitchen window. If the doing belongs to Him, then nine rafters and no roof is information about a joint, a bad year and the price of sheet steel. It is not information about your faithfulness, and it never had the right to become that.

The thing being finished is a man, not a building

Here is the second thing, and it takes the load off a back rather than adding to it.

There is a verse people put on building projects: He who began a good work in you will complete it. It was never written about a building. It was written to people, about people. The good work God began is a man, and He completes men, and He has been completing you at full pace through both of the years that barn has been open to the sky.

You have been worked on every single day of those two years, and the work did not slow down because grass came up in the corner. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit doing that work in you rather than standing in a wet barn waiting for you to find help.

There is something worth saying flat, because this is exactly where this could turn into a shove and it will not. Nothing here is telling you to get a roof on it. Not this year, not ever. If those rafters go gray and somebody eventually pulls them down for the timber you have not stepped one inch outside the work of God, because that work was never a building schedule and it does not get marked incomplete by weather.

And this is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a warm thought at a cold window. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a man has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Spoken. Not chewed over with the kettle on. And the thing in the way is not the three men, who all meant it, and it is not the knee. It is a sentence: God gave me a picture and I could not carry it. That has been running your mornings for two years and nobody has answered it out loud, and you least of all.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a man with any authority in a kitchen at seven in the morning. Scripture gives the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how strongly you said them.

If those two years have taken you somewhere darker than disappointment, and there are mornings you would rather not get up at all, tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. That is not a detour from what God is doing with your life. Very often it is exactly what He is doing, arriving down a telephone.