Still The Newest Thing You Have

She has told it about four hundred times and she is forty four years old.

It happened when she was twenty six. It is a genuinely good story, and it is true, and it involves a night in a car park in the rain and a phone call that should not have come when it came, and people cry at the right point in it, which she does not engineer and which she has learned to expect.

That is the problem in one sentence: she has learned to expect it.

She was asked, in June, at a thing where she had been speaking, by a woman she had never met before, a question that was not hostile and that she has not been able to put down since.

The woman said: "And what has He done lately?"

Not sharply. She was interested. She was, if anything, being kind.

And there was a gap. Not a long one, four seconds maybe, and then she said something perfectly good about faithfulness and the ordinary, which was true and which she has said before, and the woman nodded and the conversation moved.

She has thought about those four seconds since June.

Because the honest answer is that the newest thing she has to say about God happened when she was twenty six. Eighteen years. And nothing has gone wrong in those eighteen years. That is the strange part. No crisis, no drift, no scandal. She has served, and given, and prayed, and been faithful, and she has nothing new to report.

My Father worketh hitherto

Jesus gets in trouble for healing a man on the wrong day and He gives a defense that is one sentence long and much stranger than it looks.

But Jesus answered them, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.John 5:17

Take that where you are sitting. You are being worked on tonight, in a year with nothing in it worth telling. The word says My Father worketh hitherto, and I work, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been at it through eighteen quiet years.

Worketh hitherto. Works until now. Right up to this moment, still going, not stopped.

He is not making a general point about divine energy. He is answering a question about a specific day and He is saying: the work did not finish and it is not on a schedule you have drawn up.

Which puts something in front of you. If the Father has been working until now, then the reason your newest material is eighteen years old is not that He stopped. It is that somewhere along the line you stopped writing anything down.

So take this where you sit, and know it is not my encouragement, it is what is written: He is working in you right now, tonight, in an unremarkable August. His word says My Father worketh hitherto, and I work, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been doing that work in eighteen years you have been filing as faithful and uneventful.

There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who kept a journal for fifty odd years, and it is one of the reasons we know anything about him.

He wrote most days. Not dramatic entries. Where he had been, what the weather did, who he had spoken to, what he had read, and, very often, an honest note about his own state, including the flat stretches and the times he felt nothing.

He did not write it because he was having remarkable experiences. He wrote it, and he had thousands of ordinary people in small groups doing the equivalent out loud once a week, because he understood something about human beings: a person who does not record anything will conclude, within a few years, that nothing has happened.

That is not a memory problem. It is an accounting problem, and it has produced more discouraged believers than any doctrine ever has.

The name that got attached to those people started as mockery of how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was accurate.

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and the method included writing the ordinary down.