The drawer sticks, so he has to lift it and pull at the same time, and the token is under the takeaway menus at the back where he put it fourteen months ago.
It is the nineteen year one. Somebody handed it to him in a church hall on a Tuesday night in front of forty people and one of them cried, and he drove home feeling like a man who had built something out of nothing over half a lifetime.
Fourteen months. He is not going to go through what happened, and neither am I. What went with it is easier to list than what caused it. The job went, and it had been a good one and they had been patient longer than they needed to be. The house went. And the thing that is not a possession and does not go on a list went as well, which is the way his daughter's messages read now. Polite. Short. They end with ok.
He lives in a room above a shop with a window over the bins and a kettle on the chest of drawers. He is sober again. He has been for a good while, and nobody throws a party for that the second time, and he is not asking anybody to.
It is Thursday, a bit after seven. He came to the drawer for a bottle opener and the token was under the menus, and he picked it up because his hand went to it before he decided anything.
He stands there holding it. The lettering is worn smooth on one side from nineteen years of turning it over in his pocket when things were hard.
His daughter's birthday was last month and he sent a card and she sent back ok thanks. He read it about thirty times.
And here is the thing he has stopped saying to anybody, because he can hear how it sounds. It is not that he wants what he had. It is that he has quietly concluded he is finished with the good part. Not the sober part, he can do that. The part where something lands in your chest and lifts it. He has decided that is over for him, and that he had his share, and that a man does not get handed it twice.
Maybe that is roughly where you are. Not in the drama. Fourteen months past it, doing the right things in an ordinary way, and quietly certain that gladness is a country you have been asked to leave.
The word on the sign, said straight
The name over this page sounds like money and I want that dealt with before I offer you anything under it.
Abundance is not money. It means fullness of life, and it comes from a sentence where the Shepherd says He came so that people would have life and have it to the full. That is the whole definition and I am not going to leave it vague, because a man in a rented room who is watching his money very carefully deserves to know in the first minute that nothing on this page is a payout.
Fullness of life is a thing that can start arriving in a room over a shop with a window looking at the bins. That is why the word had to be corrected first.
You are met this evening standing at that drawer, with the token in your hand and everything you know about how it went fully in the room, and this is not me being generous with you. Isaiah 61 says He gives the oil of joy for mourning, and the giving is His and the mourning is allowed, and the Holy Spirit carries a sentence like that into a man who has stopped expecting anything.
Joy is poured, and it is not a performance
Look at the verse properly, because most people quote half of it.
The oil of joy is given. It is not achieved, it is not generated by effort, and it is not the reward at the end of a run of good conduct. It is poured out, by God, onto people who are described in that same sentence as mourning. Not people who have finished mourning. Not people who have earned their way back into the room. Mourning people, in the state they are actually in.
And oil in that verse is not an emotion, or not only an emotion. It was what you put on somebody's head at a feast, to say out loud that their being there was a gladness. Which is a very different thing from being told to cheer up.
You have gladness held out to you by God this evening and you are not the one making it, and that is what is written in Isaiah 61 rather than something I have arranged to encourage you, and it is the Holy Spirit who pours rather than the one who checks the ledger first.
Fourteen months and no parade
There is a particular loneliness in coming back the second time and I am going to name it, because it is the kind of thing a man never says out loud.
Nobody claps for it. The first time, people are around you and there is a hall and somebody hands you something and one of them cries. The second time you do it in a room over a shop with a kettle on the chest of drawers, and it is exactly as hard, and there is no ceremony because everyone has already spent what they had on the first one. That is nobody's fault and it is very lonely.
I am not going to itemize how you got here. Not one line of this article is going through it with you, and there is no program in it, and there are no stages. You know what you know. A man cannot receive kindness from somebody who is obviously pretending, and he cannot receive it either from somebody who insists on going through the accounts first.
You are not disqualified from gladness by how long this has taken or by whose hands it happened in. His compassions are new every morning and Lamentations 3 says they do not run out, and His Spirit is the one who makes that true in the fourteenth month as easily as He made it true in the first week.
And I will not promise you a feeling. I am not going to tell you when anything lands or that it will land on a particular Thursday, because that would be a prediction and this page does not deal in those. What I will tell you is that the pouring belongs to Him, and the mourning does not put you outside the reach of it, and that a man who has concluded he has had his share has concluded something about God that God has never said about him.
You were loved on the worst night of that fourteen months, at the hour of it, with nothing to show and nobody watching. That is what is written about the God who gives oil to mourners rather than a soft thing I have said to close a paragraph, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it back to the exact night it belongs to.
Something can be received standing at that drawer, this evening, with the token in your hand and nothing about the fourteen months revised.
You are inside the reach of a verse that names mourning people as the ones the oil is for, and it does not ask who caused what, and Isaiah 61 puts the pouring in God's hands rather than in yours, and the Holy Spirit does the pouring instead of the one who audits first. Nothing is being required of you. There is no version of this where you have to be further along before it starts.
So open your mouth and say it. A thing said out loud stops being a private conclusion you reached at three in the morning and becomes ground under a man's feet in front of God, and His people have always got their feet back by saying out loud what He has already settled.
Declare this over yourself
Say these three out loud. You have the standing to say them because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and nothing about fourteen months alters where a man is seated. What happens with your daughter and with the months ahead is His to decide, and however He answers, these three are true tonight. They rest on Isaiah 61 rather than on anything I could talk you into, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries them into a room above a shop.
- Token in the kitchen drawer, you are nineteen years of a man turning you over in his pocket and you are not the end of the account, and I am not going to read you as a closing balance. Isaiah 61 says He gives the oil of joy for mourning, and mourning is the word it uses and it is the word for me. In the name of Jesus I take my hand off the ledger and I hold out both hands for what He pours.
- Sentence that says I am past gladness, you are dismissed, and you do not get the last word over my evenings. God pours the oil on mourning people and He has never asked who caused what before He poured it. His compassions are new every morning, and He is glad I am here tonight in a room over a shop.
- Jesus, You are the One who was sent to give the oil of joy to people in mourning, and You did not put a clause in it about how they got there. You know the drawer that sticks, You know the word at the end of my daughter's messages, and You know what I decided about myself at three in the morning. Pour what You pour, and I am standing here with both hands open for it.
Isaiah 61:3
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.
