There Is No Difference In The Room

The whole room lets go of the page at verse three.

He notices because he is the only one still holding his. Sixty-odd people, and at exactly the same instant every one of them stops looking down. Their hands come off the paper. Their eyes go somewhere else. They sing the third verse from a place they got it from a long time before this morning. Somebody behind him starts harmonizing without thinking about it. A man two rows up has his palm out flat, like he is testing for rain.

He knows every word on that page. He can read. Reading was never the problem. The problem is that everyone else in the building learned that verse in a car with their grandmother in it, and he learned it eleven minutes ago.

Then come the announcements. Eight names he does not have. A Thursday thing at somebody's house. An inside joke about the parking lot that gets a real, warm, rolling laugh out of the whole room, and he laughs too, a beat behind, the way you do.

You sit through the whole of it and you follow about a third. Sometimes it is the language, and sometimes it is not the language at all, it is the age of everybody, or the county that everybody's family came from, or a set of references that got fixed in place a long time before you walked in. You are not resentful about it. These are kind people and you would say so to anybody. But somewhere in the middle of a perfectly good morning you started keeping a quiet private count of how much of this is actually addressed to you, and the number never gets high, and you have arrived at a conclusion you have never said out loud. You are a guest here. Welcome. Well treated. A guest.

Paul writes this sentence into an argument about exactly your morning

There is one line in the New Testament that was composed under precisely this pressure, and it is not a line about manners.

Paul is in the middle of the fight of his life over whether this whole thing belongs to one people or to everybody, and he is not writing a courtesy into it. He is making a claim about who the Lord is Lord over, and everything else follows from that:

For there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek: for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him.Romans 10:12

Two clauses, and the second one is the reason for the first. Notice that Paul does not say the difference stopped existing. A Greek did not become a Jew and a Jew did not stop being one. The differences are still sitting there in the sentence, named, in the plain daylight. What he says is that there is no difference in what the Lord is toward them, because it is the same Lord over all of them, and that is a fact about God rather than a policy about people.

You are not a guest in this and you never have been, and the same Lord who is Lord over that whole singing room is Lord over you at exactly the same strength. Romans 10:12 does not say the difference disappeared; it says there is no difference in what He is toward you, and the Spirit is the one who taught you to call on Him in the first place.

Then take the second half. Rich unto all that call upon him. Rich is not a polite word. It is a word about abundance, about a supply that does not thin out at the far end of the table, and Paul hangs the whole of it on one condition, which is calling. Not comprehension. Not fluency. Not how many of the eight names you had. Calling.

You have already called on Him, and Romans 10:12 attaches the riches to the calling and to nothing else at all. Paul attaches no other condition to it anywhere in Romans 10:12, and His Spirit has been carrying your half finished sentences upward since well before you had any vocabulary for them.

Understanding was never the door

A third of it. All right. Let us be honest about what that is and what it is not.

It is not a measure of your standing, and here is how you can tell. Twelve men walked around with Jesus for three years, in his own language, in his own country, watching him do things in front of their faces, and the Gospels are almost embarrassing about how little of it they were following. They asked him to explain the same story twice. They missed the point of the bread on two separate occasions. Nobody has ever suggested they were guests.

And then look at what God actually did on the morning this whole people went public. He did not teach everyone one language. He did the opposite and He did it loudly. Men from fifteen places stood in a courtyard and every one of them heard the wonderful works of God in the tongue he was born in.

You were spoken to in your own language before you ever tried to follow anybody else's, and that is the direction the whole thing runs. Acts 2 has God speaking every language in that courtyard rather than requiring one, and the Holy Spirit is who did the speaking.

That direction has never once reversed. It does not reverse at the end either. The last picture of the gathered people in the whole book is a multitude nobody could number, out of every nation and kindred and people and tongue, and not one of them is standing there having got past anything.

Which turns your whole morning around. The room you sat in is not the standard that you fall short of. It is one room, of one age, in one county, with one set of jokes about a parking lot, and it is a small and dear and partial sample of a thing that has never been monolingual for one hour of its history.

You have a full share in a people that speaks in more tongues than you will ever hear, and your own is one of them today. Revelation 7:9 has that multitude written down out of every nation and kindred and people and tongue, and the same Spirit who showed John that picture is the one who put you inside it.