Faithful Is He That Calleth You

There is a drawer in his kitchen and every single thing in it is something he stopped doing.

A harmonica. A language book with the bookmark two thirds of the way through, in the identical place it has been for four years. A whistle from the six weeks he coached a team in 2019. A key to a place he no longer goes. A folded sheet of paper with three names written on it one January, and he could tell you the last date he spoke to every one of the three.

He is not ashamed of the drawer, exactly. He has made his peace with the kind of man he is, which he would describe as a man who starts big. Everybody who loves him would put it more kindly than that, and he does not accept the kindness, on the grounds that he has a drawer and they have opinions.

Then there is this. Which matters more than the harmonica by a distance he could not begin to measure, and which he has been waiting to hear give way underneath him since the week it started.

You do not doubt God. That is not the shape of it, and people keep answering a question you did not ask. You doubt the hinge. You have a long and detailed record of your own conduct and you have read the whole thing, and you keep a careful little distance now from anything that might turn into people, because you know precisely how that ends. It ends with you being the one who let it go quiet.

Read the sentence for its subject

Paul ends a letter with a blessing and then adds one line that has been holding men like you upright for two thousand years. Take them together and read them the way you would read a contract, watching for who does what.

And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it.1 Thessalonians 5:23-24

Who sanctifies? The very God of peace. Who preserves? Look at the grammar: be preserved. It is done to them. Nobody in that sentence is being asked to preserve himself, and Paul is not being loose with his words; he is a careful writer and he wrote it in the passive on purpose.

Then comes the line that closes every exit. Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it.

Not faithful are you. Paul would not have put that down, because he had watched people and he had watched himself. He says the faithfulness belongs to the one who did the calling. He that calleth you. Not he that agreed to it once you had made a decent enough case for yourself. He started it. He moved first. And the last four words hand over the verb as well: who also will do it. The doing is His.

You are being kept by somebody whose record has no drawer in it, and the keeping was never handed to you in the first place. 1 Thessalonians 5:24 says faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it, written in that order and in no other, and the Spirit does the holding at both ends of the rope.

Which changes what your record is evidence about. It is evidence about you, and it is accurate, and it says nothing at all about the security of the thing, because the thing was never fastened there.

You were called, and the calling was His move from the start, so the holding of it was always His as well. Paul has the calling written into God's hands and never once writes the keeping into yours, and His Spirit was in that calling before you knew one thing about it.

Your record is real and it is not the wall holding this up

I am not going to tell you that you are being hard on yourself.

That is the standard comfort offered to a man with a drawer, and it collapses the first time he opens it. You did stop. Several times. Some of it mattered and some of the people noticed. If the whole of what I had to offer you tonight was a suggestion that your history is nicer than you remember, you would be polite about it and then you would go to bed unchanged, and rightly.

So here is the other thing Paul writes, and it is more useful precisely because it does not flatter anybody. If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself.

Read the reason he gives. Not he will hold on anyway, because he is generous about these things. He cannot deny himself. God's faithfulness toward you is not a mood He is maintaining or a decision He renews each morning after reviewing the file. It is what He is. He would have to stop being God in order to let go of you, and that is the whole security of it, and it has nothing to do with your temperament.

You are held by something God cannot revise without ceasing to be God, and that is a stronger fastening than any promise you ever made. 2 Timothy 2:13 says he abideth faithful, he cannot deny himself, written flat out with nothing conditional after it, and the same Spirit who has carried you this far is not consulting your record before tomorrow.

Now let me say plainly what I am not saying, because you have been braced for it since the first paragraph.

I am not telling you that people are coming. I do not know that. Nobody who says it to you knows it either, and I am not going to hand you a person I invented in order to close an ache I cannot close. What I am telling you is the part that is settled, and it is settled tonight whatever happens or does not happen about the drawer, the three names, or the next ten years.

You have a place among God's people that your consistency did not build and your inconsistency does not threaten. God promised to preserve His own, and Paul wrote it as something done to them rather than by them, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing it while you sleep.