She has watched about two hundred people receive something in that room and it has never once happened to her.
Not in the visible way. She is careful about the wording now, because she has had nine years to be careful about it. Things have happened to her, and she would defend that under pressure. But the kind of thing that happens in the room she runs, the kind everybody can see, the kind she has knelt beside and prayed for and driven people home afterward from, has never come to her.
She has never said that to anybody, and she is not going to. It is not a sentence a person in her position can afford to hand over.
And the thought underneath, the one that arrives at about eleven on a Thursday night, is more precise and worse than jealousy. It is not that she wants theirs. It is that she cannot work out whether a woman who hosts a thing without having had it is a servant or a fraud.
If you have carried something for other people that you have never had yourself, come and sit at this table. Nothing anybody received in that room is going to be doubted here.
Hosting and receiving are not a ledger
Let us name what is actually being compared, because the comparison has been running for nine years without being written down.
On one side: two hundred visible moments, each dated, each witnessed, each remembered. On the other: her own experience of God, which is real, unwitnessed, undramatic, and impossible to itemize.
Those two are not the same kind of thing and they never were. One is a list and the other is a life, and a list will win a comparison against a life every single time, because a list is countable and a life is not.
You are not a fraud in that room. Nothing about what has not visibly happened to you has ever measured what God has done in you. I am not saying it to protect your position. The written word says the LORD looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), which names the place the assessment actually happens and it is not the place a room can see, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that hold at eleven on a Thursday night.
The one who gives decides the form
Here is what changed this for me, and it casts no doubt on one thing that room has seen.
The verse everybody quotes for variety is doing something more pointed than variety.
But all these worketh that one and the selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will.1 Corinthians 12:11
Dividing. That is a word about distribution, and it is deliberate, and the clause that governs it is as he will. Nobody in that chapter receives what they receive because they qualified for it, and nobody is short of anything because of a defect.
Which means the two hundred did not out-qualify you, and you were not skipped. The distributing was done by somebody making decisions.
You were given to as deliberately as any of them, and Scripture puts the deciding entirely on His side. That is written into the governing clause, and it is the Holy Spirit who lands that in a woman who has driven a lot of people home.
Nothing here doubts the two hundred
Something must be said very plainly, or this becomes a quiet complaint about the room she loves.
They received. It was real, it was God, and there is no suggestion anywhere on this page that the visible kind is overrated or that the people it happened to were doing anything but receiving. Nine years of watching that has not been nine years of watching a performance.
The relief is not that theirs was less.
You have something of your own to count, and counting it takes nothing off a single person in that room. Scripture says there are differences of administrations, but the same Lord (1 Corinthians 12:5), where difference and sameness are stated together and neither is treated as a problem, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a tally, who assigns what goes where.
And if these nine years have cost more than anybody in that room knows, if sleep has gone, if the Thursdays have started to frighten, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.
So here is the turn, and it is not a promise that the visible kind arrives.
What He gave you was quiet and it was real. Yours does not have to look like theirs. The written word says the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal (1 Corinthians 12:7), where every man includes the woman at the front with the microphone, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the room's memory, who decides what that looks like.
I cannot tell you whether anything visible ever comes to you, and I am not going to guess. Nobody honest would. What I can tell you is that the two hundred were never a scoreboard, and that a servant and a fraud are distinguished by what is in the heart rather than by what a room has seen.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, in your own voice. You are in Christ and Christ is in you, and the standing under these words is His rather than the room's. You speak under His will and not your own, and what God does next, and when, is His to decide, in His own way and in His own time.
- Nine years of hosting what I have not visibly had, you are a fact about my history and you are not a report on what God gave me. First Samuel 16 says the Lord looks on the heart, which names where the assessment happens, and the Holy Spirit never once ran it in front of a room. In the name of Jesus I take you off the scales.
- Question of whether I am a servant or a fraud, you are not what God says about me and you are not sitting at this table on Thursday. First Corinthians 12 says the same Spirit divides to every man severally as He wills, so nobody out-qualified me and nobody was skipped, and His Spirit was making decisions the whole time. I am counting what is actually mine.
- Father, there are differences of administrations but the same Lord, and First Corinthians 12 states the difference and the sameness together without treating either as a problem. I thank You that Your Spirit gave to the two hundred and gave to me, out of one hand. What He gave me was quiet and it was real.
1 Corinthians 12:11
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
