Seven Fence Posts Beyond the House

For the believer who prays for people he can see from his own porch and still calls himself unattached.

Suppose a man walks his fence line on a Saturday in March, counting posts out of habit, and stops at the seventh because a light has come on in the house beyond it.

He knows who turned it on. He knows her husband died in February, that she has a son who calls on Sundays, and that she'll be up until two because grief keeps strange hours.

He's prayed for her by name every morning since the funeral, standing at this fence, with his coffee going cold on the post beside him.

Nobody asked him to. No list has her name on it and no list has his. The arrangement, if it can be called one, exists entirely between a man, a fence and God, and it has held through seven weeks of bad weather.

He wouldn't describe himself as part of a church. Ask him and he'd say he used to be. He'd give you the year he stopped, in the way a man reports an old injury.

Yet here he is at seven posts, praying for a woman he isn't related to, in weather he doesn't enjoy, with nobody assigning it and nobody checking.

God set the members in the body as it pleased Him, and that setting is finished. The written Word it in the past tense, and the Spirit keeps you there while you hunt for proof somewhere else.

The Word Belonging Got Attached To

Somewhere along the way the word belonging got attached to a room, and it's proved hard to unstick since.

It's easy to see why. A room is countable. You can stand in it, be seen in it, be missed from it on a week you don't appear. When belonging was a room you always knew where you stood, because you could physically stand there.

Now the word has no furniture underneath it, and it feels like a word with nothing behind it at all. So you say you are unattached, when what's true is that you can't see the attachment from where you happen to be standing.

That difference is worth holding onto. A thing you can't locate hasn't stopped existing. It has only stopped being visible from your porch on a Saturday morning.

You are held inside a body you can't survey, and your line of sight was never what held you. Scripture's letters place believers in the body by God's choosing rather than by anybody's mapping, and the Spirit keeps that placing in force when you can't draw it.

What God Did That Nobody Voted On

Paul writes to a congregation arguing about rank, and he answers with a sentence about who did the placing.

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

Read the verb slowly. God set them. Not the members arranging themselves into an order. Not a council approving an arrangement somebody proposed. The placing is His action, in the past tense, already done and not under review.

Then the phrase after it, which is the one that settles a fence-line morning. As it hath pleased Him. Your position wasn't a compromise He reached because nothing better was available at the time. It pleased Him to put you exactly where you're standing.

Those words went first to believers in Corinth who met in houses and squabbled about status, and nothing in them narrows on the way to a wet field.

You were placed by God rather than by a process, so no process can unplace you. The written Word's setting is recorded as His own pleasure, and the Spirit keeps you in it on a Saturday when you can't see another member from your porch.

The Spare Part in the Drawer

Here's the picture that keeps a man at his fence longer than he means to stand there.

A spare part lives in a drawer. It's genuine, it's the right size, it was made for the machine. It's also doing nothing, because it isn't connected to anything, and nothing turns because of it.

That's the fear underneath all of this, and it's worth naming plainly rather than talking around. The fear isn't that you've stopped being a Christian. It's that you've become a spare: real and useless at the same time.

A spare part doesn't pray at seven in the morning for a widow it can see from a fence, though. A spare part isn't warm. What you've been calling a drawer is actually a road, and the part in your hand is already turning something.

You aren't a spare part, because the body you're in is already moving through you. Scripture calls every member necessary rather than surplus, and the Spirit distributes the work through parts that never once saw the whole machine.

I Am Not Telling You Where to Go

Be plain about what this refuses to do, because it would be the easy ending.

I'm not going to resolve your Saturday by recommending a building. If a congregation opens up to you and you walk into it gladly, that's a good thing and I'll be glad with you. But this stands complete if you join nothing at all, because it isn't a recruitment and you aren't a gap in somebody's count.

The people in the building down the road aren't less than you either. They're carrying something real in a form you aren't carrying it in, and I won't set one against the other to make you feel better for an afternoon.

What I want gone is the drawer. Not your fence, not your porch, not your morning.

You can receive what you have without ranking it against anybody. The body was never a league table, and nobody has ever been handed a position in it to defend.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

Written by Elias This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.