You Never Did Anything Notable

The spring was on the low side of the eighty acres, in the corner where the ground stayed soft even in August, and his father had opened it out with a mattock the summer before the boy was born.

By July it had silted up again, the way it did every few years. So Wendell went down there after milking with the mattock and a spade and spent two afternoons on it. He cut the sod back. He dug the muck out by hand and threw it up onto the bank. He found the flat stones his father had set around the lip, prised them out, cleaned them, and put them back exactly where they had been, which took longer than the digging did and made no practical difference whatsoever.

Then the water came up clear and he sat on the bank with his arms across his knees and watched it fill, and that was the most notable thing he did that year.

His brother had gone to the city and done things people wrote down. There were paragraphs about his brother.

In September the church had its harvest supper and somebody stood up with a sheet of paper and read out what the congregation had done: the mission trip, the roof fund, the woman who had sat with the dying for eleven years, the two lads who ran the youth club. It was a good list and every item on it was true and he clapped at all of them.

And he sat there with his hands together, doing a sum he had done a hundred times and never once said out loud. Fifty-eight years in that pew. Nothing on the list. Not one line, not one year, and no prospect of one either, because he was not the kind of man things get written about, and he had made his peace with that in every part of his life except the part that had to do with God.

Now here is where you come into it, because you have got a version of that sheet of paper.

You have watched somebody's name read out and clapped honestly and felt something go through you underneath the clapping. Not envy. Something bleaker and quieter than envy. A conclusion. Whatever it is that gets a person properly inside this, I do not have any of it, and by now I am not going to.

There is a night coming in this article where God turns up in a field and says why He is blessing a man, and the reason is not the man.

The son between two giants

Read the book of Genesis quickly and you will walk straight past Isaac, and everybody does.

His father left everything he knew on a word from God, argued with Him over a burning city, and had his name changed in front of the whole camp. His son wrestled a stranger all night by a river and limped for the rest of his life. Between those two there is a man who mostly stayed put.

Here is nearly all of what he did. There was a famine, and God told him not to go down to Egypt, and he did not go. He farmed. And when the wells his father had dug got stopped up with earth, he went out and dug them open again, in the same ground, and gave them back the same names his father had used.

That is the resume. He re-opened other men's holes in the ground and put the old names back on them.

And then this happens, at night, in a field outside Beersheba.

And the LORD appeared unto him the same night, and said, I am the God of Abraham thy father: fear not, for I am with thee, and will bless thee, and multiply thy seed for my servant Abraham's sake.Genesis 26:24

Read the last four words again. Not because you have been faithful, though he had been. Not because you stayed when it was hard, though he did. For my servant Abraham's sake.

You are inside this on exactly that footing, and you were inside it long before your worst year and all the way through it. That is not me being generous with you: Genesis 26:24 puts somebody else's name in the reason slot, and the Spirit is the one who takes a sentence spoken in a field at night and makes it the ground under the chair you are sitting on.

How a covenant travels

Now, do not picture a contract with clauses. Picture what actually happened.

One man stood in a field and an oath was cut. He was the one who was there. But an oath cut in that world was never cut around a single life, because a man was not a single life: he was a household, and a household went forward. Servants, children, children not born yet, people who would never meet him and would live off his water.

So when Isaac walks out to a well his father dug, the water is not a favor he is being allowed. It is his. It was dug toward him. His father opened that ground with him in mind before he existed, and the fact that Isaac did not lift the first mattock is not a defect in the arrangement. It is how the arrangement was built.

You have been reading your own inclusion as an exception that was made for you, and it is not an exception. Scripture has the kindness traveling along the name from the start, and the Holy Spirit is not standing over you assessing whether you have justified the water. He is handing you the cup.

Everybody at the table is here for the same reason

This is the part that has to be said plainly, because there is a way of hearing all this that leaves a person worse off, and I am not going to leave you there.

You might be thinking: fine, so I am let in as a courtesy. I am the one being carried. Everyone else has their reasons and I have somebody else's.

No. Look around the table.

The woman who sat with the dying for eleven years is at that table for the sake of Christ. The two lads who run the youth club are at that table for the sake of Christ. The man who preached the sermon that changed your twenties is there on that name and no other, and if you asked him he would tell you so before you finished the question. There is not a first-class seat earned by service and a second-class seat given out of pity. There is one reason, and it is a Person, and it is the same reason for every single one of them.

That is why you are not a charity case. A charity case is somebody admitted on different terms from everybody else. You were admitted on identical terms to the most impressive person in that room.

You are as inside this as anyone whose name has ever been read off a sheet of paper, and you were on that footing on the day you were sure you were not. The written word makes Christ the whole reason, and His Spirit does not have a lesser register for people with nothing to report.

And there is a part that belongs to you, because covenant always has terms. God's part is the reason, and He has settled it in a Name that cannot be improved on. Your part is to stop offering a different one. To stop trying to build a line for the list so that you can feel entitled to the water.