The Fence Line He Was Given

There is a fence on that hill that runs about a mile and a quarter, and he has walked it every March since he was thirty one.

He knows it the way you know a hallway in the dark. He knows where the ground goes soft by the second gate and eats a post every four or five years. He knows the stretch above the beck where the wind takes the wire and pulls it slack, and the one straining post his father in law set that has never once needed touching, and he still says something to it under his breath when he goes past.

None of that is remarkable. He would be the first to tell you so. It is a rented hill, and the fence was there when he came, and keeping it is simply what a man does if he wants his sheep on his side of it.

But here is the thing that happened, and it happened so slowly that no morning in twenty two years was the morning it happened.

It used to be that walking the line was the best hour of his week. He can remember the first spring, twenty seven years old and not much idea what he was doing, going out with a bag of staples and a hammer and being quietly amazed the whole way round that any of it was his to look after. He was not a farmer's son. Nobody had handed him anything before.

Now he walks it with a list in his head and gets it done by half ten.

He has not stopped. That is what he would want you to understand. Nothing has been let go, nothing is falling down, the sheep are where they should be. It is only that somewhere in twenty two Marches the walk stopped being a privilege and became a task, and no one told him, and he could not put a date on it if you paid him.

If you know that from the inside, come and lean on the gate a minute. Nothing here is going to be an alarm.

A deposit is a thing somebody trusted you with

I want to give you the picture before I give you the word, because the word has been handled so often it has gone smooth.

Where Paul was writing, a deposit was ordinary and it was serious. A man leaving on a journey would put something valuable into a neighbor's keeping: coin, deeds, the family's one good thing. No paperwork. No insurance. One man's hands and another man's honor, and two rules that never bent. It was never the keeper's property, and it went back in the condition it came in.

Being handed one was, in that world, near the top of the compliments a person could receive. Somebody looked at the thing they could least afford to lose, and then looked at you.

By the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the good deposit entrusted to you.2 Timothy 1:14

Now hold that against what Paul says two sentences before it, because almost everybody quotes one half and leaves the other on the ground. In verse twelve: I know whom I have trusted, and I am persuaded that He is able to guard what I have entrusted to Him.

Two deposits, and they run in opposite directions. One is left with God, and God does the keeping, and Paul is not hoping about it, he is persuaded. The other is left with a tired young man in Ephesus, and he does the keeping, and Paul says plainly it is not done by grit but by the Holy Spirit who lives in him.

So take this before we go a step further, because you have been carrying the heavy half on your own. You are the one being kept. That is not my encouragement to a man who looks tired, it is what 2 Timothy 1:12 puts in writing, and the Holy Spirit inside you is the strength in the keeping rather than your own jaw. Guarding is what a kept man does. It is never what a frightened man does to stay safe.

The thing in your hands did not stop being real when it stopped feeling like a gift

Here is the second half, and it is the one I actually want you to hear on that gate.

Something was put into your hands on purpose. That is what twenty two ordinary Marches have hidden from you, and the hiding is no fault of yours, because a person who cannot feel much concludes very fast that there is not much there. You were handed a real thing, and you have it this morning. Scripture calls it a good deposit in 2 Timothy 1:14, and the Spirit who lives in you is the one holding it steady in hands that have gone quiet and businesslike.

What is it, in your case? For Timothy it was a pattern of sound words, and a gift, and a faith that had come down through his grandmother before it ever lived in him. For you it might be a rented hill kept honestly. It might be a marriage nobody has ever had to worry about. It might be that a great many people in your valley know exactly which door to knock on at eleven at night.

Notice what is not on that list. Not one item of it is a feeling. A deposit is not an atmosphere. You can hold a thing perfectly on a morning you feel nothing at all, and a keeper who guards only what he can currently feel is not a keeper, he is a mood.

And notice the other thing. Nothing on that list is finished. You have not run out of what you were given, and nothing you were handed has quietly expired. The word in Psalm 121:3 says the One who keeps you does not slumber, and it is His Spirit who has kept the whole of it awake through every March you walked half asleep.