Nothing Of Mine Was Ever Big Enough

He is sixty-one years old and he has known the accounts since he was five.

A sea standing up in two walls with the mud dry underfoot. Fire coming down on a soaked altar in front of a hillside of people who had come to watch a man lose. A city wall going flat outward instead of inward, which is not how walls fall.

He can tell you those. He has told them at tables and in classrooms and once, badly, at a funeral.

And this morning there is a piece of paper on his kitchen table with a heading on it in his own handwriting, and the heading says: things God has done for me.

The paper is empty, and it has been empty for forty minutes.

Not because he cannot remember his life. He remembers all of it, in order, with dates. He is the man everyone rings when they need to know what year something happened.

It is empty because every time something comes up, he measures it, and it does not clear the bar.

There was the year the results came back and it was not what they had all been braced for. He thinks of it, and then he thinks: that is not a sea opening, that is a piece of paper from a hospital.

There was the man who turned up on the doorstep in a bad February with work in his hand nobody had asked for. He thinks of it, and then he thinks: that is a friend being decent, and decent friends are not fire falling.

There was the girl who came back. Twenty-two months, and then a phone call in the middle of an ordinary afternoon.

He thinks about that one the longest. And then he puts the pen down.

Because at some point he was handed a measuring stick made out of the four or five largest things in the book, and nothing that has ever happened to him comes near the top of it.

So he has sixty-one years he believes God has been in, and a page he will not write on. And you have your own version of that page, or you would have stopped reading a piece about lists near the second line.

The measure you were handed

Let me say what governs this page before anything else. Nothing here is being asked of you. There is no appeal at the bottom, no request of any kind at any point, and I am not going to write your list for you, this morning or ever.

You are looking at an invitation, and the One being tested inside it is God. Follow the verb in that famous sentence and it lands on Him, not on you. He is the one 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 is the line, in its own room, with its own chapter around it:

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

A nation. One building. A store room that had gone empty, and families who worked there going home with nothing to eat. It is a sentence about people being fed. It was never a lever and never a scale.

Now to your page, because the trouble with it is not your memory.

God set the size of what counts, and He set it far lower than the men who taught you did. A prophet who worked within living memory of the one you have been quoted at was speaking to people looking at a rebuilt foundation so small that the old men who remembered the first building wept at the sight of it. And into that, God says: for whoever has despised the day of small things shall rejoice (Zechariah 4:10). Despised is the word He chose. Not overlooked, not forgotten. Despised. He knew exactly what people do with small things, and He named it out loud. And it is the Holy Spirit, not this page, who takes a sentence spoken over a low foundation twenty-five centuries ago and stands it next to a hospital letter you have already decided does not qualify.

You were handed a measuring stick made out of the four or five largest events in a two-thousand-year record, and you have been laying your ordinary Tuesdays against it since you were about nine. Nobody did that on purpose. It is what happens when a person is taught well and taught only the peaks.

But look at what God actually asked people to say out loud, because this is the part that undoes it.

When God wrote out the words He wanted in their mouths, He kept them small, and He wrote them Himself. There was a day in the year when a man carried a basket to the priest and had to recite something, and the words were not left to him to compose. They were prescribed, and they are these: a wandering Aramean was my father, and he went down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number, and there he became a nation, great, mighty, and populous. And the Egyptians treated us harshly and humiliated us and laid on us hard labor. Then we cried to the Lord, the God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our voice (Deuteronomy 26:5-7).

Read what is in that, and read what is not. There is no plague in it, not one of the ten, by name or by number, and there is no sea in it. The single most enormous thing that ever happened to those people is not in the sentence God gave them to say.

What is in it: my father moved around. We were few. It went hard. We cried out. He heard.

That is the oldest thing anybody in that nation had to say out loud about God, and four of its five clauses would not clear your bar. The Spirit of God is the one who makes that land on a kitchen table rather than sit in a commentary.

God kept a jar of ordinary breakfast in the holiest room He had, and He gave the instruction Himself. Take a jar, and put an omer of manna in it, and place it before the Lord to be kept throughout your generations (Exodus 16:33). Bread. One day's worth, of the food they had complained about, sealed in a pot and kept where the tablets were kept. He did not archive the sea. He archived breakfast. He did it because He knows how a person's memory works: the enormous thing gets told and the daily thing gets lost, and the daily thing was Him too.

Now the other half of it, and this half is nearer the bone.

You have not only decided that your life does not qualify. You have half decided something about yourself, which is that you must be a man God has done less for.

You are not behind on gratitude, and you are not a man God passed over. You are working from a standard He never issued. It is written: bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits (Psalm 103:2). Benefits, plural, ordinary, and the psalm goes straight on to list forgiveness, healing, being kept alive, being fed with good, not one of which is a spectacle and all of which are the actual content of a life. His Spirit is what turns that from a pleasant verse into a hand on a man's shoulder in a kitchen at nine in the morning.

And there is one more, and it is the one your teachers should have set down next to the fire on the mountain.

The man who called that fire down was, weeks later, in a cave, and God came past him. A wind that broke rocks open, an earthquake, a fire, and after the fire the sound of a low whisper (1 Kings 19:12). The text says, plainly and three separate times, that the Lord was not in any of them.

God is not withholding Himself from you until something the size of a spectacle happens, because He is not in the spectacle and never said He was. The man who had seen the largest thing of his century needed to be told that, out loud, in a cave, by God Himself. If he needed telling, you are in reasonable company at your table. The Holy Spirit is the One who makes that true in a person rather than merely accurate on a page.

Two guardrails before we go on, because they are the reason this page hands you less than it could.

Nobody here is naming your three. If I named them, you would have three of mine and a page still empty. And nobody here is turning what you find into a pattern. Three things that happened are not a forecast, they are not a system, and the moment they become one this verse is back to being the lever it was taken as.