You Already Know What It Will Cost

It has been raining on that window since about four.

Not properly. Not the kind that makes a decision. The kind that specks the glass and then runs, and then stops, and then starts again, so that every twenty minutes you look up because you thought it was over.

Malcolm has been in this room since half past six. The heater is the little oil-filled one with the wheel that never sits between two and three, so it is either fierce or off, and it is currently off, and he has his coat over the back of the chair and is not wearing it out of some idea he could not explain to anybody.

Page one is done. Page two is done. Page three has a paragraph on it that he wrote at twenty to eight, in one go, without stopping, the way the true ones always come.

He has read it eleven times since.

He knows what it says. He knows it is right. He has checked it against the text three separate ways and he has prayed over it and there is nothing in it that is unkind and nothing in it that is his own axe being ground.

And he knows exactly what it will cost.

He could name it. Not vaguely. He could tell you the specific person who will go very still at the third sentence. He could tell you who they will ring on the way home and roughly what the phrasing will be, because he has heard that phrasing before, about somebody else, in this building. He could tell you which meeting it will surface at, and how it will be raised, which will not be as an objection, because it never is. It will be raised as a concern about how people are feeling.

He knows the cost the way a man knows the depth of his own well.

And the odd thing, the thing he keeps turning over while the rain starts again, is that he is not agonizing over whether he is right. He is settled about that.

He is agonizing about the fact that either way he has to get through tonight.

If he leaves it in, he sleeps badly. If he takes it out, he sleeps badly and gets up on Sunday as a man who took it out. And there is no third door in this room, and it is quarter to eleven, and he is fifty-one years old and he is sitting in a cold hall on his own with his coat on the back of the chair.

Nobody in that building knows he is here.

And here is where I stop talking about Malcolm, because you know what the rain sounds like on that particular pane.

You have a page three. It might not be notes. It might be a conversation. It might be a thing you have known for two years and carried alone the entire time, and the cost is not vague to you either. You could name it, and the naming is the hardest part, because a fear you can price is a fear that has stopped being a fear and become an invoice.

Nobody sent you in alone

I want to start where nobody starts with you, and that is not with the message.

It is with the room.

Everyone talks to you about the message. What it should say, how it should land, whether it is the moment, whether you have counted the cost. Nobody talks about the fact that it is a quarter to eleven and the heater is off and you are the only person in the building.

That is the actual weight. Not the paragraph. The alone.

So I want to be plain with you about what I am not doing here. I am not going to tell you to preach it. That is not mine to say and I am not in your building and I do not know your Sunday. And I am not going to hint that keeping quiet would be a failure of nerve, because that is the same instruction wearing a kinder coat, and you have had enough of both from people who have never sat in that chair.

There is nothing here that you have to do. This message is complete for a man who says nothing on Sunday.

What I want you to have is this.

Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, declares the Lord.Jeremiah 1:8

Look at what is missing from that sentence.

There is no reassurance about the outcome. God does not tell Jeremiah it will go well. It does not go well. It goes about as badly as a ministry can go, for decades, and the man who received this line spent the rest of his life being exactly as unpopular as he feared he would be.

And there is no rebuke either. Notice that. Jeremiah has just said he cannot speak, he is only a youth, he is not the man for it. God does not call that unbelief and does not tell him to try harder. He answers the fear with a location.

You are not being counted as an unbeliever for being frightened at a quarter to eleven, and you never were. It is written that God did not give us a spirit of fear but of power and love and self control (2 Timothy 1:7), and the Holy Spirit is the One who supplies that in a cold hall rather than asking a man to manufacture it before Sunday.

I am with you.

Not I will make them agree. Not I will protect your standing. Not I will make it cost less. Something much older and much sturdier: you are not going to be in that room by yourself.

That is what is on offer to you at quarter to eleven. Not a promise about the meeting. Company in the cold hall.

You are not in that building on your own tonight, and you were not on your own at twenty to eight either. It is written, do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, declares the Lord (Jeremiah 1:8), and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes with you a thing a man can feel through the soles of his shoes rather than only agree with.