The Reliable One

The phone goes at ten past six on a Tuesday in March, and you know what it is before the screen turns over.

"Hey. You busy?"

You are never so busy that the answer comes out as no. A gooseneck trailer has to get from Bethel Ridge over to the sale barn at Springfield and the fellow who owns it has a thing at nine. Two hours and ten minutes each way, and you have to swing wide at the bridge because the approach is bad. You say sure. You put the coffee in the truck cup and go.

It has been like this since you were about fourteen. Somewhere in there it stopped being a favor and turned into a description. At the co op they say, ask him, he'll do it. At church last spring a woman introduced you to a visitor as the fellow who gets things done, and the visitor shook your hand and said, well, every congregation needs one of those, and you laughed, because what else do you do with that.

You are good at it. That is the trap. A man who is genuinely good at showing up gets loved in the exact shape of what he provides, and after twenty five years the shape and the man look identical from the outside.

Here is the thing you have not said out loud to anybody.

The phone rings a fair bit. It has never once rung to ask how you are.

Not in a cruel way. Nobody is being cruel. It is just that the number in their contacts is filed under a function, and a function does not have a bad week. When your back went out two winters ago you told exactly one person, and you told him mostly so he would know not to count on you for the hay.

And you have started to notice yourself doing arithmetic at odd times. On the long stretch past the reservoir with the trailer swaying a little behind you, you catch yourself wondering what they would say at your funeral, and you already know, because you have heard it said at other men's. He was always the one you could call. You know it is meant as the highest thing they have. And it lands on you like a receipt.

That is what I came out here about this morning. Not the trailer.

The name.

What a covenant always did to a man's name

Watch what happens when God binds Himself to Abram. He does not hand him a feeling and He does not hand him a program. He changes the man's name.

The old man goes to bed as one thing and gets up as another, and now every neighbor, every herdsman, every stranger at the well has to say the new one out loud whether they understand it or not. He did not grow into it first. He did not earn it over a decade and then get it as a plaque. The name arrived on the front end, on the day the oath was cut, and the rest of his life was spent walking around inside a name he already had.

That is not a self image exercise. That is a legal act between parties, and the party with the authority to do the naming did the naming.

Now come further along and look at the loneliest man in the book of Isaiah.

In that world, your name lived through your children. Sons carried it. Without them, a man was a line that stopped, and everybody knew it, and there was no polite way around it. He could work all his life inside a great house and be spoken of as the one who kept the storerooms, and when he died the storerooms would go on and the name would not.

And God speaks straight into that man's ear, and He talks about a wall.

Even unto them will I give in mine house and within my walls a place and a name better than of sons and of daughters: I will give them an everlasting name, that shall not be cut off.Isaiah 56:5

Picture the courtyard. The stone is warm. The names of the household are set into it, cut deep, and the mason is still working, and the owner of the house comes across the yard and puts his hand on the wall and says: put his there. Inside my walls. Better than sons.

Take that off the page and put it on yourself, because it is yours. You have a place cut into the wall of God's own house, put there by the Owner, and no season of usefulness bought it and no tired season can wear it off. Isaiah 56:5 is where it is written down, and the Spirit is reading it over you right now, at the gate, with the dew still on the rail.

Reliable is a job. It was never a name.

Sit with the difference for a minute, because it is the whole thing.

A job description is what you provide. It is priced by what other people need, it moves with the season, it belongs to them, and it goes the moment you cannot supply it any more. That is not an accusation about your friends. It is just what a description is.

A covenant name is what somebody with the authority has decided to call a man. It is given, not achieved. It does not fluctuate with the harvest. And it is the Owner's word on you, not the neighborhood's.

So no wonder you are tired. You have been carrying a description around as though it were a name, and a description was never built to hold a man's weight. It cannot answer him in the dark, it cannot sit down with him, and it never once asks him how he is.

Here is what God does with that. You are named, this morning, before you move one trailer, and you were named on the day the oath was cut and not on the day you finally felt it. That is not encouragement from me. It is written in Isaiah 56:5 and it is the Holy Spirit, not my sentence, who is walking it up out of the page and into the chair of a man who has never been asked how he is.

Nobody has to believe it for it to be yours

One thing about a name given in covenant, and it matters more here than anywhere.

It is not held up by the neighbors' opinion. Abraham was Abraham at the well among people who thought the whole business was foolishness, and the name held anyway, because the naming was never in their jurisdiction.

So the fact that no one in your county calls you by this name changes nothing about whether you have it. And the fact that you do not feel it at ten past six on a Tuesday changes nothing either. Feelings are the weather over the field. The deed is at the courthouse.

You have a name this morning that was not issued by anybody who needed something from you, and His word says it will not be cut off. The Spirit is the One making that land as a fact rather than as a nice sentence, and He is unhurried about it, so let it take the whole drive home if it needs to.