The Names Inside the Tool Box

For the believer whose tools were all given by Christians he no longer sits with.

You open the box on a Saturday because the gate has dropped again, and you take out the adjustable wrench that isn't yours.

It's never been yours. A man lent it to you for an afternoon in a year you'd have to work out, and neither of you ever mentioned it again. You've used it perhaps two hundred times since. There's a strip of masking tape on the handle with his initials in marker, faded almost to nothing, and you've never peeled it off.

Underneath it there's a wood chisel somebody's widow gave you because her husband had no sons and you'd helped him with a floor. There's a set of screwdrivers a couple handed over when they moved abroad, still in the roll they came in.

You could go through that whole box and put a name on most of it. Not brands. Names.

Then you close the lid, go out to the gate, and think of yourself as a man who doesn't really have anybody. You've thought that so many times it no longer feels like an opinion.

The eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of thee, and you've been saying it to yourself. The Word says that that sentence out of the body's reach altogether, and the Spirit won't carry it into your Saturday on your behalf.

What You Have Been Saying to Yourself

Nobody ever told you that you were surplus. That's worth getting straight before anything else.

The congregation didn't vote you out. No one wrote to say you were no longer required. What happened is that you stopped being in the room, the rota stopped including you, and somewhere in the quiet afterwards you drew a conclusion nobody had actually handed you.

Then the conclusion started doing work of its own. You didn't ring the man with the initials on the tape. You didn't tell the couple abroad what happened. Not out of pride, but out of an idea that you'd become somebody who takes up a slot without filling it.

That idea has been living in your house for four years and paying no rent for the room.

You aren't surplus to anybody, because the verdict you've been carrying was never issued. It is written that forbids exactly that sentence inside the body, and the Spirit keeps you counted while you argue with yourself in a garage.

The Sentence Paul Would Not Allow

Here's the verse, and notice that it's a prohibition rather than an encouragement.

And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you.1 Corinthians 12:21 (KJV)

Cannot say. Not should not, not ought to be careful about. The sentence is ruled out of the body's vocabulary entirely, because it would be false wherever it was spoken and by whoever spoke it.

Now notice who's forbidden from saying it. The eye and the head, which are the parts with the view and the authority. Paul locks the sentence away from the people most likely to reach for it.

Which leaves exactly one voice in the room still saying it about you, and that voice is yours. You've been speaking a line into your own life that Christ didn't permit anyone else to speak over you.

Those words went first to a church sorting itself into ranks, and they reach a garage without needing to be stretched.

You can stop saying to yourself what the body is forbidden to say to you. Scripture's sentence takes it out of circulation completely, and the Spirit won't carry it into a Saturday morning.

Somebody Put Their Name on Your Hand

Go back to the box, because the box is an argument in your favor.

Every one of those tools was somebody deciding you were worth equipping. A man doesn't lend a good wrench to a person he regards as finished. A widow doesn't hand over her husband's chisel to somebody she thinks has nothing left to build.

They weren't being sentimental about it either. They were being practical, in the way people are practical about somebody they expect to keep working. The tools are a record of other members judging you necessary, in their own handwriting, in marker on tape.

You've been holding their verdict in your hand two hundred times and reaching past it to your own.

You're equipped by people who judged you necessary, and their judgment stands over yours. Scripture puts every member in place by God's arrangement rather than by self-assessment, and the Spirit has kept those tools in your hand for a reason you haven't been able to see.

I Am Not Handing You a Job

Say clearly what this isn't doing, because the obvious next move would hurt you.

I'm not about to tell you to go and find a ministry in order to prove any of this. You aren't being pointed back toward a rota. Nothing here depends on you taking something on, and if you mend the gate today and nothing else for a month, every sentence above is still true.

Nor am I saying the people still serving in the building down the road have it easier or harder than you do. They're carrying a real thing in a real place. I won't weigh one against the other to make a point.

What I want out of that garage is the word surplus. The gate can wait. The word can't.

You can be necessary today without taking on a single duty to prove it. Membership was God's arrangement rather than your output, and an arrangement isn't renewed by activity.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

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