Two Years On One Phone Call

There is an envelope in the drawer under the takeaway menus with four names written on the back of it in biro.

It used to be six. Two of those people have died.

For eleven years his front room was where a handful of them met on a Wednesday: four chairs and the good armchair, a teapot with a chip out of the spout, and whoever came. Then it thinned, and then it stopped, and nobody made a decision about that, it just stopped the way things do.

And for two years he has been asking God whether to ring the first name.

He is not a coward and he is not lazy. He is careful. He has a rule he has never said out loud to anybody, and it goes like this: if God wants it, God will make it obvious. So every morning he checks the day for obviousness. A verse landing twice in the same week. A conversation at the bus stop that goes somewhere strange. A number turning up where it should not. He has an honest heart and he is genuinely watching, and he has been watching for two years.

It has never once been unmistakable enough.

Because here is the thing about a sign you are grading yourself: you can always argue it down. Every single one of them has a plain explanation available, and he is an intelligent man, and he finds it. Twice he has got as far as the phone in his hand. Once he got as far as the first three digits.

One of the four moved house last spring. He knows this because somebody mentioned it at a funeral. He does not have the new address.

That is what two years costs, and nobody sent him a bill for it.

Now I want to stop saying he.

Because there is a thing in your drawer. You know the exact drawer. And there is a version of that rule running quietly in you too, and it does not sound like fear when you say it in your head, it sounds like reverence. I do not want to run ahead of God. I do not want to make it up. I do not want to be one of those people who says God told them when God did not.

That instinct is good. It is a real and honorable thing and I am not going to talk you out of it.

But something has been using it against you.

Read the order

There is a sentence in Acts about two men in a difficult town, and everything you need is in the order of it.

So they stayed there a long time, speaking boldly for the Lord, who bore witness to the word of His grace by granting signs and wonders to be done through their hands.Acts 14:3

Hear this with the envelope in your hand. You are not presumptuous for going, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture has them speak boldly in the Lord and the confirming follow after, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept those four names in a drawer in front of you for two years.

Read it again slowly and watch the sequence, because the sequence is the whole teaching.

They spoke. Then He bore witness.

Witness is a word that comes second by definition. You cannot confirm a thing that has not been said yet. A witness does not walk into a room and testify about a sentence nobody has spoken; he confirms what was already there. So the signs in that town were not the green light. They were the confirmation of a word that two frightened men had already opened their mouths and said.

Signs follow. They come along behind the going, the way the wake comes along behind the boat, and no boat in the history of the sea has ever been pushed forward by its own wake.

You have been standing on the shore for two years waiting for a wake.

The written word puts the speaking first and the confirming after it, and the Spirit of God has never reversed that order for anybody.

And now the thing I will not do.

I am not going to tell you that if you make that call, God will do something visible. I am not authorized to say that and neither is anybody else. He is not obliged to write anything over your street, and there are faithful people who go their whole lives without seeing one single thing they would honestly call a sign, and they are not a lesser rank of believer, and nothing has failed in them. If nothing dramatic ever happens on your Wednesday, that is not a verdict on you and it never was.

Nothing written anywhere makes certainty the condition of a phone call, and the Holy Spirit has been near that drawer the whole two years.

And this is not a dare. Nobody here is telling you to do anything reckless, or to put yourself or anybody else in the way of harm to see whether God turns up. He is not a switch you flip to check the light works, and He does not need testing, and a person who is being asked to gamble is being asked by the wrong voice.

Look at what the sentence actually promises, because it is better than a sign anyway.

The Lord, working with them. That is what is on offer. Not a guarantee about the weather over your house. His own company, alongside your ordinary, unglamorous, unconfirmed obedience. He was with them in the speaking, which means He was with them before there was anything to point at, which means the thing you have been waiting for has been standing next to you in the kitchen for two years while you looked at the sky.

The written word has them speak boldly in the Lord, and the Holy Spirit was the one working with them while they spoke.

And hear this too, because I do not want you carrying it out of here: those two years were not unbelief. They were reverence with nowhere to put itself. You were not disobedient. You were waiting for a permission that had already been given in a form you did not recognize, because it did not arrive as lightning. It arrived as a name on the back of an envelope that you cannot stop thinking about.

Hear this too, and let it land on the envelope. You have not been faithless for waiting, and Scripture is what says so. What is written puts the speaking first and the witness after it, and the Spirit of God has never once made certainty the condition of a phone call.