The Folding Chairs at the Back

The room was full by ten past, so he is at the back with the chairs.

That is his job and nobody assigned it to him. He knows the stack behind the kitchen door, and how the third one sticks, and that the concrete lip by the fire door will trip a woman carrying a baby. He has set out chairs in this building for thirty one years. Tonight there is a portable pool up front with a garden hose coiled behind it, white towels on the trestle table, and the whole place smells of chlorine and coffee.

They are baptizing four people. The microphone goes down the front row and each of them says a few words first.

The first one talks about a hospital corridor. The second one says the word prison, plainly, and the room goes quiet and then warm. The third one is nineteen and cries before she gets a sentence out, and a hundred and forty people love her for it. And the man at the back with his hand on the stack of chairs does the arithmetic he has done at every one of these for three decades.

He has no corridor. He has no year he could name. He was seven, at a vacation Bible school in this building, in the room that is now the nursery, and there was a paper plate with cotton wool glued to it, and at the end of the week a woman with a felt board asked them if they wanted to pray, and he did, in a folding chair, with glue on his fingers. Then they had juice.

That is it. That is the whole of it. No night that split into a before and an after, no sentence anybody in this room would lean forward for, and he has never once said out loud what he thinks about that, which is that he got in on a technicality and nobody has checked the paperwork yet.

So he stands at the back. He hands a chair along the row when somebody comes in late. He claps at the right times and he means it, every time, and he goes home and cannot think of one honest thing he could have said into that microphone.

You know the folding chairs. Yours might be the back row, or the kitchen during testimony night, or the polite half smile you have practiced for the question about how you came to faith. And you know the arithmetic, running quietly the whole time, comparing a room full of corridors to a paper plate.

The day the foundation went in

I build, so let me take you to a building site, because God took a whole nation to one and said something there that has been misread ever since.

The exiles came home and started the second temple. The old men had seen Solomon.s house, and when they saw the footprint of this one going in they wept out loud, and Ezra says it honestly: nobody could tell the weeping from the shouting. It was small. Next to what they remembered, it looked like nothing.

And into that, God put a question through Zechariah, and it is a question and not a statement, which matters.

For who hath despised the day of small things? for they shall rejoice, and shall see the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel with those seven; they are the eyes of the LORD, which run to and fro through the whole earth.Zechariah 4:10

Somebody in that valley was despising it. He asks who. He does not say the thing was small and He is fine with it anyway. He says a day of small things had been despised, and He wants the name of the man who did it, and He answers the question Himself in the next clause: they shall rejoice when they see the plumb line come out.

You are the day of small things He was defending in that sentence, and you were being defended before you knew there was an argument. His word did not put that question in the record to be gentle with somebody. It put it there to correct a whole valley, and the Spirit who carried Zechariah's line through twenty five centuries is holding it over a room with a stack of folding chairs in it.

Now, a plumb line. That is my trade, so hear me. Nobody brings a plumb line to a finished building. It comes out when the first course is going in and it is the tool that says this is true, this is upright, this is going to stand. The sign that God had not despised the small day was a measuring tool in a man's hand at the beginning.

You have the small day and the plumb line in the same promise, and they were never separate items. Zechariah 4:9 says the hands that laid the foundation are the hands that finish it, and the same Spirit who said not by might, nor by power runs that line down a wall nobody was photographing.

Nobody photographs a footing

Here is a thing every builder knows and no one else has any reason to.

The photographs are of the roof going on. Nobody has a picture of the footings. A footing is a trench, a day with a pump running, gray concrete going into the dark, nothing anybody would put on a wall. And it is the whole reason the building is still standing forty years later. The part of the job that decides everything is the part with no photographs of it.

A hospital corridor makes a photograph. A prison makes a photograph. A folding chair with glue on your fingers in a room that is now the nursery does not, and the mistake, the one that has been quietly running for thirty one years at the back of that hall, is treating the photograph as the building.

You were never asked to produce a photograph, and the absence of one was never entered against you anywhere. Scripture records that a foundation went in while half a valley wept over how small it looked, and the Spirit's verdict on that day came in a question aimed at the critics rather than at the builders.

And I want to be careful here, because this cuts both ways and I will not have it cut only one. The corridor is real. The prison is real. The nineteen year old who cannot get a sentence out is not performing, and God was in every one of those rooms. A loud beginning is not a suspect beginning any more than a quiet one is. What I am dismantling is not the front row. It is the ruler.

You have a God who does not run a comparison, and He is not running one tonight. It is written that the eyes of the Lord run to and fro through the whole earth, and His Spirit came to rest on a small foundation in a valley with the same weight He brings to anything.

A seed is small on purpose

So what is the thing itself? Peter puts it in one sentence and he uses a builder's word for it.

Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever.1 Peter 1:23

Seed. Not event. Not testimony. Not moment. A seed is the smallest visible stage of a living thing and it is the entire living thing, complete, waiting on nothing but time and ground. Nobody has ever looked at a seed and been impressed. Nobody has ever measured one against a tree and concluded it was a lesser kind of thing.

You have a beginning made of imperishable seed, and it was imperishable on the day it went in. Peter says by the word of God which lives and abides forever, and the Spirit is the one who does the sowing rather than the strength of the feeling in the room where it happened.

And notice who the actors are in that verse. The seed. The word. Neither of them is the person. Nobody in Scripture is ever said to have birthed himself, and the new birth is called a birth for exactly that reason: it names a thing done to a person, at the hand of Someone else, which is why the size of the ceremony was never carrying any of the load.

You are held by something that does not perish, and it was never held up by your memory of it. His word says the seed is incorruptible and the word abides forever, and it is His Spirit keeping that, not the clarity of a seven year old's recollection of a Thursday.