For the musician whose friend was kind enough to let her pray, and meant nothing by it.
Dust is coming down through the ceiling, and every head in the house has tipped back to look at it.
Somebody is up there. Four of them, by the sound of the scraping, pulling a roof of mud and thatch apart from above while a teacher goes on talking underneath. A square of light opens and widens. Then a corner of a mat comes through, lowered on rope, and on the mat lies a man who cannot move his legs.
He hasn't said a word. Not on the road, not on the outside stair, and not now, with a room full of strangers staring up while he is lowered into the middle of their meeting. Four men hold the corners, and their faces are at the edge of the opening, watching to see what the Lord does next.
I want to set that picture beside your practice room, because you stood in a room like it on Thursday afternoon. You asked your bandmate whether you could pray for him before the appointment, and he agreed the way a person agrees to a cup of tea. He bowed his head for you, thanked you warmly afterward, then asked whether you wanted to work the bridge again.
Your believing carried something real into that room whether or not the man beside you meant a word of it. It is written that Jesus saw their faith, and the man on the mat had put nothing at all into it. The Holy Spirit does not tune Himself to your bandmate's agreement before He starts.
The Beat Nobody Else Counts
Let me name the weight before I say one word about lifting it, because you have carried it a long while on your own.
Praying for somebody who doesn't pray is a lonely line to hold. You do it in the car before rehearsal, or at the kitchen table with the metronome still ticking in the next room. Nobody asks how it is going, and there would be no easy way to answer them if they did.
Somewhere in these last months a sentence moved in and got comfortable. It told you that your believing is a fond private habit the band is gracious about, and that nothing can really move while the man it is for stays politely where he is.
Here is the line Mark wrote down about that crowded house.
When Jesus saw their faith, he said unto the sick of the palsy, Son, thy sins be forgiven thee.Mark 2:5 (KJV)
Put your finger on the word their and hold it there a moment.
The man on the mat adds nothing at all to that sentence. He doesn't ask, he doesn't argue his case, he promises nobody anything about tomorrow. He is carried, he is lowered, and the Lord speaks before he does.
The roof was not his idea. The faith Jesus saw in that house was in the forearms of four men holding the corners of a mat.
You are holding one corner, and a corner is a real job to be holding. The Spirit keeps your love from climbing onto the mat and calling control by the name of faith, and Scripture gives that corner its whole weight in a single pronoun.
Stay in that a moment, because it is nearly all I have for you today. Heaven read the carrying that afternoon, and it read it in four men whose names nobody bothered to write down, and it reads it in a name on a card under a metronome.
Mark tells us nothing about what the man believed on the way there, and we won't build past that silence. The account hands nobody permission to steer another person's will, to walk around a kind and clear no, or to settle how any of it ends. It gives one clear picture instead, of people bringing somebody they love to Jesus.
So set this down off your shoulders. Your bandmate isn't a passage you are learning badly, and his politeness isn't a sin. The questions he carries are not a charge waiting on your answer before the appointment, and your prayer was never meant to be persuasion said quietly.
You are free to carry a man's name without carrying his certainty for him. The Holy Spirit works at the edge of another person's freedom, which is exactly where your hands were told to stop. God's word shows friends bringing a need to Jesus and going no further than that.
What You Carry Into the Room
The tiredness didn't start in the praying. It came from hearing every warm thank you as a beat dropped out of your praying, and then keeping the count all through the set.
Let the count go, because it was never yours to keep. Nobody in that band was ever handed a vote on where you stand with God, and nobody in a waiting room gets one.
You keep your own beat, never the other musician's part. The Holy Spirit does in a grown man what no well-rehearsed argument of yours has ever managed. Scripture hands you the corner and then stops there, on purpose.
Here is what you carry into that room. You may say his name to God as often as you want, offer to pray when he is willing, and set it down without sulking when he isn't. You may drive him there, sit in the chair beside him, and be the steadiest person in his whole week.
Here is what you do not carry. You don't write what he believes, you don't walk around a no he gave you kindly, and you don't read the news from that appointment as a mark on your praying. What he does with God is his own, and the timing of it belongs to God alone.
That last one matters, so let me say it plainly rather than let it slip by in the mix. The news from that appointment is not a verdict on your faith. Your standing is never tied to an outcome anywhere in the written Word of God, and the Spirit keeps your heart out of a courtroom that nobody ever called.
Declare this over yourself
You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so what follows is not a claim made out of your own authority. It is agreement, said back to God in His own words, while the Holy Spirit carries it. How He orders the rest of it is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own time.
Your place in Christ was written into the score before you ever sat down at this instrument, the way a key signature is set before the first bar, and no line you sound tonight changes it. So speak what follows the way you count yourself in, steadily and without pushing. It gives God no cue and sets no tempo over that waiting room. It marks your own bars, and it stops at the bar line.
His name is under the metronome, and he is nobody's assignment, least of all mine. Scripture counts four at the ropes and not one of them speaking, so I hold a corner and I leave his belief where it is. The faith I carry into that waiting room is enough, and his polite yes in the doorway rates my praying at nothing at all. The questions he lives with are not an indictment waiting on my reply. I stop counting heads the way I count a bar, because nobody's agreement is the downbeat here. The Holy Spirit was in that room before either of us walked in, and nobody sitting there had to approve Him first. I carry the name, and his belief, his choices and the news from that appointment stay in God's keeping.
Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.
This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.
Mark 2:5
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.
