The Song He Could Play Asleep

He can do the whole thing without being present for any of it.

Eighteen years. Same room, near enough, and he knows exactly where the sound goes funny by the second pillar. He knows which key gets the men singing and which one loses them by the second verse. He knows to hold the last chorus back and then let it go, and he knows precisely how long you can sit in silence before it stops being holy and starts being awkward.

He is not cynical. Do not read this as cynical. He would go on Sunday if nobody came.

But here is what he noticed, and he noticed it in the car park with the boot open and a guitar case in his hands.

He had run a good morning. People had been moved. Somebody had come up afterwards and told him so and meant it. And he had felt nothing at all, and he had not felt anything for a considerable while, and he could not say how long.

The thing he used to have was not a technique. It was that he had been eating.

There was a stretch, years ago, when he was new at it and clumsy and had almost nothing, and he read like a hungry man, and everything he put in went straight out again the same week to a room full of people. He was not running a service back then. He was passing on his dinner while it was still warm.

Somewhere between then and now, that stopped, and nobody noticed, including him, because the mornings kept working.

If you can run yours in your sleep, come and sit down at this table. Nobody here is going to hand you a plan.

The building is still going on

Paul writes a sentence to a church he had never met, and he stacks four images on top of each other, and every one of them is unfinished.

Rooted and built up in Him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.Colossians 2:7

Rooted. Built up. Established. Abounding. Not one of those has a full stop in it. He is not describing a state anybody arrived at, he is describing something still going on in people who were already believers, already taught, already running the thing.

And that is the first thing worth having tonight, because a man in a car park with a guitar case has usually concluded that the growing part was for the beginning and the serving part is for now.

You are not past the point of being fed, and there is no year in this where that changes. Colossians 2:7 keeps every one of those verbs open ended, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the building rather than your appetite, so eighteen years is not a ceiling and it was never meant to become one.

Depth is a supply, not a reserve

Here is the other picture, and it fixes the arithmetic you have been doing quietly against yourself.

Jeremiah describes a tree by water whose leaves stay green through a drought, and the reason is not that the tree stored rain in a better year. The reason is that its roots are in the stream. The dry weather is happening above ground and the supply is happening below it, and the two are simply not connected in the way everybody standing in the heat assumes.

You have been thinking of your depth as a tank you filled once. It is not a tank, and that is why it has felt like running out.

You have a root in water that has never stopped moving, and it is under you tonight. John 7:38 has Jesus speaking of rivers of living water flowing out of a person, and John says outright that He meant the Spirit, so what you are afraid has run dry is a current rather than a container.

And I want to say the plain thing about your eighteen years before we go on, because you are perfectly capable of turning this into an accusation.

Nothing about those years was wasted, and nobody is calling them shallow. What you learned when you were new was real, and it fed a room for a very long time, which is not an indictment, it is a compliment to how deeply you took it in at the time.

There is no program here. No plan, no scheme with a name, nothing to keep up. You are already growing, and you are being fed right now, as you read. Psalm 1:3 says the tree planted by streams of water yields its fruit in its season and its leaf does not wither, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes lines you have sung four hundred times and makes them food again, which is the one thing no amount of effort could have arranged.

The whole of the offer is this. Not more input. Slower input. Fifteen years ago you read like somebody eating, which means you went at half speed, and stopped, and said things out loud, and went back over a line twice because it had hit something. Somewhere since then you started reading the way a man checks a page he already knows.

And under all of it: God is the one keeping you while you keep what He gave you. The root is not your achievement. It is where He planted you.