The Thing Left In Your Keeping

Wednesday, half past seven, twenty of them on their feet in a hall that smells faintly of floor polish and the coffee somebody made at seven. The radiators are ticking. There is a running joke about the tenors that is at least eleven years old and still gets a laugh.

Tom is in the bass row where he has stood for nineteen years, and the hymn is one he could sing in his sleep. Two hundred times, easily. He knows where the alto part goes odd in the third line. He knows to breathe after the word mercy.

And halfway through the second verse he hears himself from the outside, the way you sometimes catch your own voice on a recording, and what he hears is a man mouthing it.

Not badly. Not visibly. Nobody near him would ever know. He is on the note, he is on the beat, he is doing everything he has always done, and something has gone out of it that he cannot name and absolutely cannot date. It was not last year. It was not the year his father died, because he can remember singing right through that and meaning every word.

Nothing has gone wrong. He has not walked away from anything, not stopped, not doubted, not had a crisis anybody could point to. He does everything he did. And standing there in the bass row with a folder in his hand, he thinks a sentence that a great many faithful people think and almost nobody says: something has gone thin, and I could not tell you when.

If you know that sentence from the inside, come and stand over here a minute. This is not going to be an alarm.

What A Deposit Actually Is

I want to give you a picture before I give you a word, because the word has been worn smooth.

In the world Paul was writing in, a deposit was an ordinary and rather serious thing. A man going on a journey would leave something valuable with a neighbor: coin, documents, the deeds to a field, the family's one good thing. No paperwork, no institution, no insurance. Just a man's hands and another man's honor. And the two rules of it were absolute. It was never the keeper's property, and it had to be handed back in the same condition it came in.

Being trusted with a deposit was, in that world, one of the highest compliments a person could be paid. It said something about you that nothing else said. Somebody looked at their most valuable thing and then looked at you, and decided.

That is the picture behind the sentence Paul writes to a young man who is tired and frightened and running a church he did not ask for.

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

Now hold that verse next to what Paul said two sentences earlier, because the two together are the whole of this site and most people only ever quote one of them. In verse twelve he says: I know whom I have trusted, and I am convinced that He is able to guard what I have entrusted to Him.

Two deposits. Look at the direction of each.

One is left with God, and He is the one keeping it, and Paul says plainly that he is convinced God is able. The other is left with Timothy, and he is the one keeping it, and Paul says just as plainly that he does not do it on his own strength but by the Holy Spirit who lives in him.

So take this now, before we go any further into the teaching, because you have been carrying the wrong half of it. You are the one being kept. Scripture does not hang your safety on the quality of your watchfulness; it says God guards what has been entrusted to Him, and it is His Spirit and not your grip that does the keeping in you. Guarding is what a kept person does. It is never what a frightened person does to stay safe.

And now the other half, which is the part I actually want you to hear tonight in the bass row.

Something was put into your hands. That is the thing the thinness has hidden from you. When a person cannot feel much, they conclude very quickly that there is not much there, and that conclusion is almost always wrong, and it is certainly wrong in your case. You were given something. You were looked at, and trusted, and handed a real thing, and it did not stop being real when it stopped being loud. That is exactly what 2 Timothy 1:14 calls a good deposit, and the Spirit who lives in you is the one holding it steady in hands that have gone quiet.

What is it? For Timothy it was the pattern of sound words he had heard, and a gift, and a faith that had come down through his grandmother and his mother before it ever lived in him. For you it might be a marriage that has been kept, or a habit of telling the truth in a workplace where it costs you, or nineteen years of standing in a bass row so that a hall has a sound at all, or the fact that a great many people in this town know they can knock on your door.

Notice something about that list. Not one item on it is a feeling. A deposit is not an atmosphere. You can hold a thing perfectly well on a night when you cannot feel it at all, and a keeper who only guards what he can currently feel is not a keeper.

So the noticing you did in that hall was not an accusation. It was a kindness. It is the sort of thing that happens when the Spirit who lives in a person draws his attention gently to something, and the tone of it matters enormously: this is not a summons, and Scripture has not opened a file on you. Nobody is being told they have wasted a year. A thing that has thinned is not a thing that has gone.