Not in Vain, Even This Morning

The kitchen is exactly the same and that is the whole problem.

Same mugs on the drainer from last night. Same pile by the door that has been there since the weekend. Same light doing the same thing on the same worktop at the same hour. Nothing in this room has any idea that anything happened, and there is no reason it should, and she is standing in it at half past seven feeling something she cannot quite name.

Because last night was real.

She is not confused about that. She was not in a heightened state, nobody talked her into it, and what she did she did quietly and on purpose. Something turned. She could describe it, if she had to, in about two sentences, and both of them would be honest.

And now the mugs are on the drainer and the pile is by the door and she is standing in a room that has not registered a thing.

Here is what happens next in a person, and it happens fast. The sameness of the room becomes a statement about the night. Nothing changed here, therefore nothing changed. It is not an argument she would defend if you wrote it down for her, and it does not need to be, because it does not arrive as an argument. It arrives as a feeling in a kitchen at half past seven, which is a much more effective delivery method.

That is you at the drainer.

You've walked into a morning that looks precisely like the one before, and the room's indifference has quietly become evidence, and you have never once noticed that a kitchen is not a witness.

Paul says where the not in vain actually lives

Paul finishes an enormous chapter about resurrection with a practical sentence, and the last three words are where the whole thing rests.

Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.1 Corinthians 15:58

Your labor is not in vain in the Lord.

Look at where the guarantee is located. Not: your labor is not in vain because you will see results. Not: because it will show. Not in vain in the Lord, which is a statement about the sphere the work is held in rather than about what turns up in your kitchen.

That is a completely different kind of assurance from the one you have been looking for, and it is the only kind that holds on a morning like this.

You are standing in a morning whose sameness has no authority over what happened, and the not in vain is located somewhere your kitchen cannot report on, and I am not softening Paul: 1 Corinthians 15:58 puts it in the Lord, in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying so who can get that into a woman at a drainer at half past seven.

Now look at the two words he chooses just before. Stedfast, unmoveable. Those are not words about feeling. They are words about position. He is asking for something a person can do while feeling nothing at all: stay where you are put.

And notice what he does not say. He does not say be encouraged. He does not say wait until you feel the difference. He says be unmoveable, which is instruction for exactly the morning when everything around you is saying that nothing occurred.

You have been given an instruction that fits this morning rather than a better one, and it asks for position rather than feeling, which is written into those two words rather than into my encouragement, with the Spirit of God able to hold somebody in place who has nothing at all to stand on but a sentence.

There is one more thing in it. Forasmuch as ye know. Paul assumes his readers know this, and knowing here is not the same as feeling. He is appealing to something they can hold on to when the evidence is absent, which is the only situation in which a person needs to be told to be unmoveable in the first place.

This holds this morning, in a kitchen that has registered nothing, because Scripture puts the not in vain in the Lord, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a room where the mugs are still on the drainer.