The Man Who Leads It Is Dry

Thursday nights, half past seven, and there are usually somewhere between eleven and thirty of them depending on the season and whether there is food.

He has done it for nine years. He is not paid for it and he has never asked to be. He turns up early, he stacks the chairs afterward, he learns their names and their sisters' names, and there are four young men in that town who would tell you, without embarrassment, that he is the reason they are not somewhere else.

Nine years ago, in the car after the first one, he told God he would give those kids everything he had for as long as God wanted him to.

He has kept it. That is the unusual thing about this article: the promise was kept.

What broke is on the inside.

For three years there has been nothing there. He gets up, he prepares, he prays before he goes, and it is entirely mechanical. He talks about God with genuine accuracy and no heat whatsoever. He sings with the room and hears himself. He has not had one moment of anything in three years, and he can date roughly when it went, and he cannot tell you why.

And what he has concluded is the worst thing a man in his position can conclude: that he is a fraud. That there is a room of teenagers being led toward a thing he does not currently possess, by a man who is running on habit, and that the honest thing would be to stand down.

He has drafted the message twice. He has not sent it. And the reason he has not sent it is not courage, it is that he cannot work out how to phrase it without lying, since the true version is: I feel nothing and I have not for three years.

You may be running something on empty. And you may have started to believe that the emptiness makes you dishonest, and that the decent thing would be to step out of the way.

A dry man's psalm, kept in the book

Now let me put something in front of you that you have almost certainly read a hundred times and never once applied to yourself, because you have been reading it as a description of the good state.

Psalm 63 is the one everybody quotes for thirst. And people quote it as though it were about a healthy appetite for God. Read the setting. It is a psalm of David when he was in the wilderness of Judah, which is not a metaphor, it is a place, and it is a place where there is no water.

O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is.Psalm 63:1

You are in a condition Scripture writes from rather than merely about, and it was never treated as disqualifying. Psalm 63:1 is written from a land where no water is and was kept exactly as it stands, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept you turning up for three years.

Where no water is

He does not say his soul is satisfied. He says his soul thirsts, and he says it from a location he names twice for emphasis: a dry and thirsty land, where no water is.

That is a psalm written from the inside of exactly your condition. Not about it, from inside it. And here is the thing that should reach you: God kept it. It went in the book. It has been sung by the people of God for three thousand years, and it is a dry man's psalm, and nobody in all that time has suggested that David should have stood down until he was watered.

You are in a condition Scripture writes from, not merely about, and it was never treated as disqualifying. Psalm 63:1 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of a wilderness and puts it in a church kitchen on a Thursday night.

Now let me deal with the word fraud, because you have used it about yourself and it is the wrong word and I want to take it off you precisely.

A fraud claims to have what he does not have. Have you claimed heat? Have you told those young men, once, that you feel something you do not feel? I would put money on it that you have not, because you are the sort of man who could not, which is exactly why the word has stuck to you and hurt.

What you have actually done is talk accurately about God, for three years, out of no personal supply, to people who needed it. There is a name for that, and the name is not fraud. It is closer to what a man does when he carries water to somebody else across a dry country.

You have been carrying to others what you are not currently drinking, and that is not dishonesty, it is service. Scripture puts a thirsty man's words in the mouth of the whole church, and the Spirit of God is the one who has kept a man turning up early and stacking chairs for three years with nothing in it for himself.

The dryness is not the disqualification

Let me guard this now, and I am aware that I am the one voice in this house most likely to be believed on it, so I will be careful.

I am not going to tell you the water comes back. That is not mine to promise and this site does not schedule the current. It may. It may come in a form you do not expect, and it may take longer than you would like, and none of that is in my gift.

What I will say is that the dryness is not a report on your standing, and it is not evidence that anything you have said in that room was false, and it is not the sign that you should stop. Those are three different conclusions and you have run all of them together into one and been carrying the bundle for three years.

You are heard at this temperature, and you were never leading on the strength of your own supply. His word says it and does not soften it, and that is the plain sense of a dry land psalm surviving in the hymnbook of a whole people, and His Spirit is the one who has been the actual supply in that room the entire time.

If you do stand down, let it be for a reason you would accept from somebody else, and not because you feel nothing. And if you stay, stay flat. Both are honest. Only one of them is being decided by a fact that has nothing to do with the job.