Twenty-six years and eleven box files and a spreadsheet he started reluctantly and now would not be without.
He is the one who knows. Who married whom, which year the hall roof went, who the man in the photograph on the end wall is and why nobody says his name. If a family comes back from somewhere far off wanting to know where their grandmother was born, they get sent to him, and he finds it, usually in about ten minutes, and he never charges anybody a thing and would be insulted if they offered.
He loves it. That needs saying, because people assume it is a duty and it is not.
And on Tuesday he was doing an entry for a woman who died in the spring, which is the part of the job he takes most seriously, getting somebody down properly, and he had her in the file in about eleven lines and he was pleased with it.
And then he did a thing he has never done, which is search his own surname.
It is in there, obviously. Forty-odd times. His grandfather twice, at length.
There is no entry for him.
There is no line anywhere in twenty-six years of keeping this that says what happened to him, or what he came through, or what anybody did for him, or what God did.
He has written up nine hundred people.
And you know that, because you have kept something faithfully for years and never once put yourself in it.
Nobody has written up the one who writes
Let us settle what governs this whole page. Nothing on it is being asked of you, there is no appeal at the bottom, and nobody here is going to write your entry for you.
You are looking at an invitation, and the One being tested inside it is God. Follow the verb in the famous sentence and it lands on Him. He is under examination. He is the one who offered to be found out. It is written, put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts (Malachi 3:10), and the Holy Spirit is the One who lets a reader hear that verb land where it actually lands.
Here it is, in its own room:
Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.Malachi 3:10
Said to a nation, in one decade, about one building, where the store room had emptied and the families who worked there had gone home hungry. It is a sentence about people eating, and it was never a lever.
And here is what belongs on this page.
God had already been faithful to those people for centuries before He ever invited them to test Him, and He was already faithful to you long before you searched your own name. That invitation arrives at the end of a very long book, spoken to people whose entire record is a list of what He had already done. The test was never the start of His faithfulness. It was an invitation to read the file. It is the Holy Spirit, not this page, who takes that and sets it on a long table with eleven box files open on it.
Now the empty entry, and it needs the truth rather than a compliment.
Nobody here is going to call that humility. Twenty-six years of getting other people down properly is a real work and a rare one, and this community would have lost itself without you. But a man can do a real work and still be outside it, and you felt exactly which one it was on Tuesday.
And nobody is going to call it ingratitude either. If anybody has ever suggested that a person who has not recorded God's goodness has not noticed it, they were wrong, and it was unkind.
Forgetting your own is the ordinary condition of a person, and God has never once been surprised by it. It is written, bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits (Psalm 103:2), and it is a person addressing himself out loud because he knew he would not do it otherwise. It is written, I will remember the deeds of the Lord (Psalm 77:11), which is a decision, made deliberately, on a bad night, by somebody who had to make it.
And here is the passage for the one who keeps the record.
He asked them. When I sent you out with no purse, He said, did you lack anything? And they said, nothing (Luke 22:35).
Nobody had written it down. Three years of it and no file. It had to be raised by a direct question, and the answer came back in one word, and it had been true the whole time.
You are not being asked to feel anything, you are being asked to make one entry, and those are two different jobs. It is written that you shall remember the whole way the Lord your God has led you (Deuteronomy 8:2), and the sentence is addressed to each person about their own way. His Spirit is the one who makes that a line in a file rather than a mood you have to produce.
Now the guardrails, because they are why this page hands you less than you would like.
Nobody here is going to draft your entry. Three of somebody else's is exactly what nine hundred files already contain.
And nobody is going to turn what you write into a pattern. It will not predict anything, it is not a system, and it does not add up to a forecast about the years you have left. Three things that happened, recorded properly, by a man who records things properly. That is enough.
God proved Himself to you long before anybody suggested testing Him, and the finding out is looking rather than earning. It is written that He is the same yesterday and today and forever (Hebrews 13:8), so whatever ends up in your entry is not a coincidence in the record. It is the same One in nine hundred other files.
So close the spreadsheet and open a page.
The empty entry is not humility and it is not ingratitude. It is what happens to the man who keeps the record, and God has been faithful to you through all twenty-six years whether or not one line of it has ever been written down.
He proved Himself long before you searched your own name. The searching was not the start of it. It is an invitation to read a file that has been open the whole time.
You have twenty-six years of God being faithful to you behind you already, and the finding out is looking rather than earning. It is written that He is the same yesterday and today and forever (Hebrews 13:8), so what you come back with is not a run of good luck, it is the same One who was in the first year of the record. His Spirit is what turns that from a fact about eternity into a hand on a man at his own desk.
Nothing is required of you for that to be true, and nothing on this page will write it for you.
Come and see. He has nothing behind His back.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud with the paper in front of you. You have the right to speak them because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and that standing was given to you and never earned by service, which is exactly the thing this verse has been used to obscure. Scripture is the ground under every line and the Holy Spirit is what makes them live in a person. Speak first to the twenty-six years, then to the thing you have quietly assumed about your own place in the record, and then turn and speak to Him. Whatever He does after you say them is His, and it is not a scoreboard.
- Twenty-six years of keeping everybody's record, you are not a reason mine is empty. God had been faithful for centuries before He ever invited anybody to test Him, and He was faithful to me while I was writing up the nine hundred.
- Idea that the man who keeps the file does not belong in it, you are not sitting at this table. It is written that a man told his own soul to forget not all His benefits, and he said it out loud because nobody else was going to write it down for him.
- Jesus, You asked them straight out whether they had lacked anything, and three years of it had never been recorded until You raised it. I make my own entry in Your name, on a page nobody will file, because You proved Yourself to me long before anybody asked, and I am going to learn what I think at last.
Malachi 3:10
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