They Are Waiting On You To Be Complete

The gravy boat comes around the table for the third time and somebody says the thing about his mother's recipe that gets said every single year, and everybody laughs at it again anyway.

It is a good table. That has to be said first, because it is true and because it changes what this is about. His sister brought the pie. His brother in law fixed the wobble in the leaf of the table that morning without being asked. There are nine of them squeezed in with the good chairs and the porch chairs mixed together, and the ones at the far end are arguing cheerfully about a ball game none of them watched.

Then he says something. Not a speech. He mentions, passing the beans, that he had been praying about the thing at work and it went better than he expected.

And the table does the kind thing it always does. A small warm pause. Somebody says that is good. Somebody else says it in a nicer voice than usual. And then the conversation moves on, gently, the way people move a conversation past a hobby nobody else keeps, and the beans go around, and nobody is cold and nobody is unkind and nothing at all is wrong.

You have felt that pause. You would not trade these people for anybody. And you go out to the porch afterward to bring in two more chairs, and you stand there in the cold for a second longer than you need to, and the sentence that comes up in you is not a complaint about them. It is a verdict about you. You are the only one who carries this, and you have never once been able to see what difference it makes that you do.

So somewhere along the line you filed yourself under least. Least significant believer God has got. A man who fixes things and pays his bills and believes every word of it privately, and if he were quietly removed from the whole account of the faith, the account would not notice.

The chapter runs out of names on purpose

There is a chapter in Hebrews that people call the hall of faith, and it is usually read as a list of the great ones. Read it slower than that.

It starts with names, and famous ones. Then somewhere in the middle the writer stops. He says outright that the time would fail him to tell of the rest, and from that point on the chapter carries whole crowds of people with no names at all. Ones who were mocked. Ones who were shut up. Ones who wandered in deserts and mountains and in dens and caves of the earth, and the text says the world was not worthy of them, and it does not tell us what a single one of them was called.

Sit with that for a second, because it dismantles the arithmetic you have been doing on the porch. The Bible's own honor roll is mostly anonymous. God kept the record and left off the names, which means the names were never what put anybody on it.

You are one of a household that runs back a great deal further than your last name. Hebrews 11:39 and 40 leave a sentence deliberately unfinished, and it is the Holy Spirit who read you into the half of it that is missing.

Here is how that chapter ends, and it is the strangest closing line in the whole book.

And these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise: God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect.Hebrews 11:39-40

Read the last six words twice. They without us should not be made perfect.

You have kin in the faith you have never met, and not one of them is finished without you. That is promised in writing, and His Spirit does not hold a promise loosely.

Perfect means finished, and the finish is corporate

The word behind perfect there is not about moral polish. It is a builder's word and a runner's word. It means brought to completion. Carried through to the end of the thing it was started for.

So the sentence says something that ought to stop a man in the doorway with two porch chairs in his hands. Every one of them, the named and the unnamed, the ones the world was not worthy of, are held at the line. Not punished. Not waiting in some anxious lobby. Held, in the way a good builder holds off on the last course of brick until every piece that belongs in the wall has arrived on site, because a wall finished around a gap is not finished, it is spoiled.

And who is the gap. The text says us. Not the impressive ones among us. Not the ones whose households all believe the same thing. Us, a flat plural, written by a man who never met you and had no way to filter you out of it.

You were written into a plural you never applied to join. The word puts you in it, and the Spirit is what keeps you there.

Now let me say plainly what the ground is, because encouragement without ground is just a nice evening. You are among God's people, and you have kin in the faith, because God provided some better thing for us. It is His provision, named in the text as His. Not your usefulness. Not your visibility at your own dinner table. He built one household across every century and He put you in it, and the writer of Hebrews would not have known how to write that sentence in a way that left you out.

It is already settled that you are one of them, and the account was closed before you started keeping score on yourself. Scripture laid that load path, and the Holy Spirit is the one bearing it.