The Table He Sets Without Looking

Sunday, and it is not a small operation.

Fourteen at the table if everybody comes, and everybody nearly always comes, and he starts at about half nine in the morning.

He does not mind. He has never minded. It is the thing that holds the week together and he knows it, and he would be far more upset by an empty table than by a full one.

Here is what happened three Sundays ago and he has not stopped thinking about it.

He was at the stove with two things going and somebody shouting a question at him from the courtyard and a child under his feet, which is entirely ordinary and happens every week.

And for about four seconds he thought: I would like all of you to leave.

Not a rush of temper. He did not say anything. Nobody noticed. It was cold and it was clear and it lasted about as long as it takes to stir something twice, and then it went, and the day was lovely.

But he has not been able to put it down since, because it did not feel like tiredness. It felt like a view.

He is not going to tell anybody. He can imagine how it would sound. Fourteen people at his table and a man saying he had a moment where he wanted them gone.

If something like that has surfaced in you, come and sit at this table. Nobody is going to ask you to examine yourself.

Every verb in that promise belongs to Him

Let me put the verdict down first, because you passed one on yourself at that stove and it has been standing for three weeks.

Four seconds is not a view. It is four seconds.

And more importantly, Scripture does not treat what surfaces in a person as a charge to be answered. It treats the inside of a human being as something God undertakes to deal with Himself.

And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.Ezekiel 36:26

I will give. I will put. I will remove. Every single verb belongs to God, and nobody in that verse is asked to produce a better heart first in order to qualify for one.

You are being dealt with as somebody God renews rather than somebody God assesses. Ezekiel 36:26 puts the whole transaction in His hands, and the very next verse names His Spirit put within you as the one who does it, which means what surfaced at your stove is a thing He tends rather than a charge He files.

Guarding your heart is protecting a spring

Now the second thing, and it keeps a good man out of a trap he is standing right beside.

Proverbs says keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life, and almost everybody hears that as an instruction to go inside and investigate.

It is not. The word is a guarding word, the sort you use about something valuable, and the picture in the same breath is a spring in the ground. Nobody stands over a spring with a clipboard. You keep the leaves out of it and you do not let anybody build on top of it. That is the whole job.

You are not being asked to audit yourself, and you never were. Proverbs 4:23 hands you a spring to protect rather than a self to interrogate, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the protecting from the inside, which is why years of Sundays have never once required an investigation to stay love.

So we are not going in there today. No inventory, no working out what the four seconds meant, no deciding what sort of man has thoughts like that. Everybody has thoughts like that. A man cooking for fourteen with a child under his feet is a man whose body is under load, and load produces all sorts of things that are not opinions.

You are going to hand one thing over, and that is the entire move.

You have somewhere to put this, and you are allowed to put it there today. 1 Peter 5:7 says to cast your anxiety on Him because He cares for you, and it is His Spirit who makes that an actual transaction rather than a sentiment, so the four seconds has an address and it is not your own chest.

And under all of it: God is the one keeping your heart while you keep watch over it. You have not been standing guard over yourself alone at a stove.