For the one who has quietly decided that a small kindness does not count.
It's ten past one on a July afternoon and there's a blue cooler sitting on the concrete beside the parcel lockers, with a folded card taped to the lid.
The card says help yourself. You wrote it with a marker pen and you were embarrassed the whole time you were writing it.
Inside there are about fourteen bottles of water, all of them cold, sitting in ice that you bought from the garage on the way home. The riders come through between twelve and three, six or seven of them. By four the cooler is usually empty, and you take it in.
You have been doing this since the second week of June. Nobody knows about it. Your wife knows, obviously, because of the ice and because of the second trip to the garage.
The thought you have had almost every day, usually while refilling it, is that none of this is really anything. That it's a gesture. That the eight years you spent on a service team meant something, and that a cooler on concrete is what a man does when he has nothing left to do.
He set the value of a cup of cold water Himself, and no rota has ever been allowed to revise it. The written word records the sentence He used, and the Spirit brought it back to you beside the lockers.
Who Set the Value
Ask who has the authority to price this, because you have been letting somebody else do it.
The price you've put on it is low. A gesture, you said. Not really anything. That valuation feels objective, in the way our own harsh assessments usually do, but it came from somewhere and the somewhere is worth identifying.
It came from eight years of visible service inside a structure that could measure. Hours, attendance, responsibility, a named position on a printed sheet. Against those measures, ice in a cooler is worth nothing whatever, because not one of them is capable of detecting it.
That is not a criticism of the measures. They were built to run a large operation and they did it well. An instrument calibrated for hours on a sheet simply has no reading available for a man on concrete in July.
So you're valuing this using an instrument built for something else, and the instrument is reporting zero, which is exactly what it would report for anything it cannot detect.
You're pricing this with an instrument that cannot detect it. The written word supplies a different valuation, and the Spirit has kept it in front of you all summer.
A Cup of Cold Water Only
Here's the verse, and He puts a value on it explicitly, which He rarely does.
And whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup of cold water only in the name of a disciple, verily I say unto you, he shall in no wise lose his reward.Matthew 10:42 (KJV)
A cup of cold water only. He includes the word only, which is the word you'd use if you wanted to name the smallest imaginable act of kindness and pre-empt the objection that it's too small.
Then He attaches a guarantee to it, introduced with verily I say unto you, which is the formula He uses whenever He wants something understood as settled beyond any further argument.
He did not have to say any of it. The disciples had not asked Him to price small kindnesses, and nothing in the passage required it. He volunteered a valuation, unprompted, for the benefit of people who would one day be tempted to think their own contribution was beneath notice.
Jesus said that to men He was sending out with almost nothing, into places where they'd depend on strangers, and it reaches past them to a man with a cooler beside a set of parcel lockers.
He named the smallest act He could think of and then guaranteed it. The written word puts His own valuation on it, and the Spirit brought the sentence back to you.
Cold Is in the Sentence
Notice a detail He didn't have to include, because it tells you how precisely this is aimed at you.
Cold water. Not simply water. In a hot country, before refrigeration, cold water meant somebody had gone down to a well, or to a spring, or had kept a jar in the shade specifically so that what they gave would be cold rather than tepid.
The word cold is evidence of forethought. It means the person planned to give before anybody arrived, and took a small amount of trouble so that what was handed over would be better than it strictly needed to be.
That is a detail nobody would invent. It is the sort of detail only somebody who had actually watched people give water away would think to specify. It has been sitting in that verse for two thousand years, waiting for a man with a cooler to notice it.
You bought ice. From a garage. In advance, on your own money, so that what a rider takes at ten past one is cold rather than warm. The detail He chose to specify is the exact detail of what you've been doing since June.
The word cold is evidence of forethought, and you buy ice. The written word names that detail specifically, and the Spirit had you doing it before you saw the verse.
I Am Not Telling You Organized Service Is Lesser
Be fair, because this must not become a case against the eight years you gave.
Organized work matters. Teams accomplish what individuals can't, and eight years of showing up for one was real and I'd not have you think otherwise for a moment.
Nor am I telling you a cooler is equivalent to everything you did then. It isn't the same, and it doesn't reach as many people, and you're right that something was lost.
What I want off you is the word gesture. Not the ambition to do more. Not the memory of the eight years.
You Were Embarrassed Writing the Card
Here's the turn, and it's in the embarrassment rather than the cooler.
You felt embarrassed writing help yourself on a card with a marker pen. That embarrassment is worth examining, because you weren't embarrassed doing eight years of visible work in front of hundreds of people.
You were embarrassed because there is no cover here. No role, no team, and no structure to stand behind. Simply a man putting a cooler down on concrete where somebody might see him and wonder what on earth he is doing.
That's not a sign the act is small. It's a sign it's yours, entirely, with nothing between you and it. What you're calling a gesture is the first thing you've done in four years that cost you something you couldn't hide behind.
The embarrassment is evidence that nothing stood between you and the act. The written word puts His own value on it, and the Spirit has had you out there since June.
Declare this over yourself
You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so what follows is not a claim made out of your own authority. It is agreement, said back to God in His own words, while the Holy Spirit carries it. How He orders the rest of it is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own time.
Speak it as a person already joined to Him rather than as one applying to be. The Spirit carries the words, and how God answers is not something anybody can hand you in advance.
Say it the whole way down the page.
He set the value of a cup of cold water Himself, and no rota has ever been allowed to revise it. The Word says that whoever gives one of these little ones a cup of cold water only shall in no wise lose his reward, and He used the word only about the smallest act He could name. The Spirit brought that sentence back to me beside the lockers. I am not pricing this with an instrument that cannot see it. The word in the verse is cold, which means forethought, and I buy ice from a garage before anybody arrives. I keep filling it.
Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.
This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.
Matthew 10:42
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
