Faith That Costs An Afternoon

A man went to a meeting he did not want to attend.

He had been a preacher already. He had crossed an ocean already and come back thinking he had failed at the whole thing. And on a Wednesday evening in a room on a street in London, listening to somebody read out loud, something happened in his chest that he could only describe afterwards as being strangely warmed.

Now, if that were the end of the story, this site would not exist and neither would the tradition that came off it.

Because here is what he did with the warmth.

He got on a horse.

He rode to places where nobody had built a building, and stood on his father's gravestone in a churchyard because he was not welcome in the pulpit, and preached in a field to men coming up out of a coal mine with their faces still black. He went into the prisons, week after week, for years, to men waiting to be hanged, who had absolutely nothing to give him and never would. He organized people into small groups with plain rules, not because rules are holy, but because a warmed heart with nothing to do cools by about Thursday.

That is the founding fire. Not the feeling. The direction the feeling went.

And here is why I am telling you, and I want you to feel the sting of it, because it is a clean sting and it is not a rebuke.

I know believers whose faith is entirely indoor. It is real. It is not fake and I will not let anybody call it fake. They pray, they know the Book, they carry things for people in their prayers at night, they weep at the right places in the right songs.

And it has never once cost them an afternoon.

Everything it asks of them happens inside a life they were already living. It fits the diary. It does not require them to be anywhere inconvenient, or in a room that smells wrong, or in a conversation that goes nowhere, with somebody who will not remember their name and could not repay them if they did.

And there is a quiet unease that comes with that. It does not feel like guilt. It feels like a suspicion.

The suspicion is: this was meant to go somewhere.

Warmth that stays indoors goes out

Now let me be very careful, because there is a version of this message that does damage, and I am not preaching that one.

I am not going to tell you that you are not doing enough. I do not know your week. I do not know what you are already carrying, what your body will do, who depends on you at six in the evening, or how many hours of your life are already spoken for by people who cannot manage without you. If you are the one holding a household together with both hands, this message is not a bill.

I am also not going to name your cause for you. That is not mine.

I am going to show you one line, and let it do its own work.

I was ill and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.Matthew 25:36

Take that this afternoon. You are free to spend something that returns you nothing. The word says I was in prison, and ye came unto me, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept that sentence in the gospel for people whose faith has cost them nothing yet.

Look at the verbs. Looked after. Came to visit. Not funded. Not campaigned. Not felt strongly about. Somebody went, and stayed a while, and went home.

And look at who is on the other end of them. A person in a bed. A person behind a door that locks. In the world that sentence was spoken into, neither of them could do a single thing for the visitor. There was no return. There was no network in it. Nobody was going to hear about it.

Which is exactly why Jesus put those two examples in the list rather than easier ones. He is describing a love with the transaction taken out. That is the whole test in the passage, and it is the only test I am going to give you tonight.

Does your faith go anywhere it gets nothing back?

Not: does it go everywhere. Not: does it go often. Once. Anywhere. One place where nothing returns.

Because a warmed heart is not a possession. It is a fire, and every fire is doing one of two things, and it is never neither. It is either being carried somewhere or it is going out where it stands.

You have the warmth. You have had it for years. Nobody is questioning that.

The question is whether it has been outside.

And before the story, hear what is written: you are free to spend an afternoon that returns you nothing, and the return was never the point. His word says I was in prison, and ye came unto me, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept that sentence in the gospel for people whose faith has cost them nothing yet.