The Joint That Supplies

By four in the morning the smell has got into everything he owns.

His jacket. The inside of his car. His pillow, apparently, because his sister mentioned it once and then laughed and said she liked it.

He did not grow the wheat. He did not mill the flour. He did not write the recipe, which is older than the building and belongs to the family whose name is over the door. What he does, from eleven at night until seven in the morning, is move trays. Proofer to bench. Bench to oven. Oven to rack. Rack to the front, where at ten past six a woman turns the key in the door and the street begins.

He is, by his own description, a conveyance. That is the exact word he used, once, to himself, driving home with the windows down.

You have your own version of it, and you know the equation because you built it yourself. It runs like this. Giving means having something to give. Something to give means having something to say. Something to say means having something to teach. And you have nothing to teach, so.

You could not explain a difficult chapter to anybody. You have never led a single thing in your life and would not want to. You have read the lists, and every list wants a teacher, an organizer, a person who is good with people, and you have quietly closed a fair number of those lists and gone to put the kettle on.

So the sentence sits there, and you have almost said it out loud a few times, and you have never quite done it.

If I disappeared tomorrow, I honestly do not think anybody would be short of anything.

The part Paul names is not the part you would have named

There is a sentence about how the body of Christ actually grows, and the striking thing about it is the piece of anatomy it puts at the center.

From whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love.Ephesians 4:16

If you were describing a body you would reach for organs. The eye that sees. The hand that grips. The heart, the lungs, the parts that visibly do something and could be listed on a form. Paul does exactly that elsewhere, at length, and it is a good picture.

But right here, at the precise point where he explains how the whole thing grows, he does not name one organ. He names the joints.

Stay with that, because it is not a decorative choice. A joint produces nothing. A joint does not see, think, digest, grip or generate a single thing of its own. It has no output that could be credited to it. What a joint does is supply: it is the connection through which what one part has reaches the part that needs it. Take out every joint in a body and leave every organ perfectly intact, and what you have on the floor is a pile. Not a weakened body. Not a body with reduced function. A pile.

The whole increase, Paul says, comes by that which every joint supplies.

You are a joint in this body, and a joint has never once been required to have a product of its own. Ephesians 4:16 names the joint and gives it the supply, and it is the Holy Spirit who runs through the joining, which is why what passes through you was never limited to what originates in you.

The man moving trays did not make the bread. The bread still reaches the street at ten past six because he moves the trays, and if he stops, the ovens can be perfect and the recipe can be a hundred years old and the street goes without.

You have a working part in this, and it was never going to be measured by what you can explain. The emphasis in that written sentence falls on supply and never on eloquence, and the Spirit of God is the one who set the members in the body, which was never a thing anybody had to apply for.

According to the measure of every part

Now take the middle clause, because it is the one that decides how this lands on a hard day.

The increase happens, Paul says, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part. Measure. Not the same measure everywhere. Not a required minimum with a line drawn under it. The growth of the whole body is built, in that sentence, out of parts working in the measure they have.

Which means a small measure, worked, is exactly what the verse is describing. It is not a shortfall against somebody else's. It is the material the sentence is made of.

This matters enormously if today has almost nothing in it. There are readers who have three good hours in a day and readers who have twenty minutes, and there are days when the measure is one sentence said with your eyes shut. That is not a lesser category of part. Nowhere in that verse is anybody asked to work above their measure, and nobody who reads it honestly can turn it into a demand for more.

You were given a measure, and this verse builds the growth of the whole body out of measures exactly like yours. Scripture credits the increase to the working in the measure of every part, and the Holy Spirit is the one who supplies the working, so it never has to come out of your reserves.

There is one more thing in the verse and it is easy to walk past. The body grows unto the edifying of itself in love. The building up is done by the body to the body. Not by the platform to the crowd. Not by the qualified to the rest. By the thing to itself, through its joints, most of it invisible, all of it counted.

Right now, as you read, you are already supplying something to people you have never counted. You have it promised at Ephesians 4:16, and His Spirit is the one carrying it, which is precisely why you have never been able to see the far end of what goes through your hands.