For the believer who eats Sunday lunch alone after watching somebody else's service.
One placemat comes out of the drawer, the same one every week, and the other three stay underneath the cutlery tray.
You take it out at about half past twelve. One mat, one plate, one glass, and a fork you've dried and put away so many times the pattern has gone soft at the tines. The laptop sits at the far end with the sound still up, though the service finished twenty minutes ago and what's on now is an advert for a car.
That drawer has a stiff runner and it sticks. You notice it every week, you've never fixed it, and you wouldn't say out loud why.
You eat. You wash the one plate. You put the one mat back on top of the other three and close the drawer with your hip.
Somewhere in that routine, most Sundays, you think a sentence about yourself that's begun to feel like a fact, which is that you're watching a church rather than being in one.
God set the members in the body as it pleased Him, and every one of them includes you. Scripture that in the past tense to a quarrelling congregation, and the Spirit keeps your place laid while you eat alone on a Sunday.
Watching Is Not the Same as Missing Out
Handle the laptop honestly, because it's doing two jobs at once and only one of them is good for you.
Watching a service isn't nothing. You're hearing Scripture read, you're hearing people worship, and some weeks a sentence lands on you and carries you through a hard Wednesday. Nobody should sneer at that, least of all somebody who has never had to rely on it.
What the screen also hands you, though, is a camera angle. You see a full room from outside it, every single week, and the camera is never once pointed at you. So the format itself keeps teaching you a position, and the position it teaches is spectator.
That's a lesson about a camera. It isn't a lesson about your standing before God, and the two have been arriving together for so long that they've grown into each other.
Separating them is most of the work here. One is a fact about how broadcast works and has been true since the first service was filmed. The other is a claim about where you stand with God, which no camera has ever been in a position to make about anybody.
You aren't a spectator of the body you belong to, whatever the camera keeps implying. Scripture places believers inside the body by God's own arrangement, and the Spirit makes that true in a kitchen no camera reaches.
God Set Them, and It Pleased Him
Here's the passage, and the last line of it is the one to read slowly.
But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him. And if they were all one member, where were the body? But now are they many members, yet but one body.1 Corinthians 12:18-20 (KJV)
Every one of them. Not most. Not the ones with somewhere to be on a Sunday morning. The setting is comprehensive, it's God's doing, and the word after it is pleasure rather than tolerance.
Then comes the question about all being one member, which is Paul pointing out that a body made of identical parts in identical positions wouldn't be a body at all. The variety isn't a problem to be solved. It's the reason the whole arrangement works.
Those words went first to a congregation with real divisions in it, and they arrive at a table for one without narrowing. A place unlike anybody else's place is still a place He was pleased to set.
You were set in the body by God Himself, and He was pleased to put you exactly here. Scripture's sentence gives the setting as His pleasure rather than His compromise, and the Spirit holds you in it on a Sunday that looks like nobody else's.
The Drawer You Have Not Fixed
Come back to the drawer, because you and I both know it isn't about the runner.
Three placemats live in there. They've been in there long enough to have a fold across them. Every week you take out one and put back one, every week you touch the edge of the other three, and you've arranged the whole routine so you never have to think about them.
I'm not going to tell you to set four places for people who aren't coming. That would be a performance, and you've had enough of performing for one lifetime.
Nor am I going to suggest you get rid of the other three. People do that sometimes, in a hard week, and regret it in a quiet one. The drawer can stay exactly as full as it is.
What's worth saying is gentler and harder. Those three mats aren't evidence that God set you aside. They're evidence that you have loved people, and love leaves furniture behind it. Somebody who had never belonged anywhere would have one mat and no drawer at all.
You're carrying proof of love rather than proof of exclusion, and you've been reading it upside down. The written Word you into the body as one member among many by God's own setting, and the Spirit keeps that reading straight when the drawer sticks.
I Am Not Going to Send You Somewhere
Be plain about the ending this refuses to write, because you've probably braced for it already.
I'm not about to tell you the answer is a building next Sunday. If a door opens and you walk through it gladly one day, that's good and I'll be glad with you. But every sentence above stands if you never do, and I won't hold the real thing back from you until you make a move somebody else decided on.
Nor am I saying the people in that video are doing better than you. They're in a form of this that you aren't in at the moment. Ranking it would only give you a fresh way to lose.
What I want lifted off you is the word spectator. Not the laptop. The word.
The Setting Was Done Before Lunch
The turn here is about which verb sits in the past tense, and it changes what your Sunday actually is.
You've been trying to earn a place, or find one, or at least locate the entrance to one. The verse doesn't offer you a place to find. It reports a place already set, by God, with pleasure, before you got up this morning.
So you aren't sitting outside a room hoping to be let in. You're sitting at a table where the place was laid first and the plate came second, and the laying was never your work.
That's why the fourth mat is a red herring. Your place isn't in that drawer. Your place is in a body, God set it, and He hasn't moved it because your kitchen is quiet.
You have a place that was laid before you arrived, and no empty chair can unset it. The written Word's sentence puts the setting in God's hands and in the past tense, and the Spirit makes it a present fact at half past twelve.
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.
You speak here as somebody Christ has joined to Himself, which is why this is agreement and not a performance. The Spirit carries it, and what He does next is not for you to decide.
Say it once, plainly, where you are.
God set the members every one of them, and every one includes me. Scripture says that God hath set the members every one of them in the body as it hath pleased Him, and pleasure is a strong word to use about a Sunday like mine. The Spirit holds me in that place while I eat alone and watch a screen at the far end of the table. I am not a spectator. The three mats in the drawer are proof that I have loved people rather than proof that God set me aside. I receive the place He was pleased to give and stop looking for the entrance to a room I am already inside.
Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.
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1 Corinthians 12:18-20
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