Nobody Knocks for a Lanyard

The hired center smells of floor polish and somebody's slow cooker. Sixty people are coming through the double doors with pillows under their arms and carrier bags of teabags nobody trusted the kitchen to have, and by the trestle table there is a room list, a box of keys on rings too big for a pocket, and a shoebox of lanyards on blue ribbon. The woman with the clipboard explains it twice over the noise. The blue ones are the ministry team, so that anybody who needs praying for across the weekend knows who to go and find. It is a sensible arrangement. It is, honestly, a kind one.

She is not on the list. Then at about nine, somebody's chest goes and they stay home, and the woman with the clipboard catches her by the urn and says we are two short, would you, and a length of blue ribbon comes down over her head and settles on her collarbone. Here is the part she would not say out loud in a hundred years, and it is the part this whole message is for. It felt good. Not the serving. She has served since she was fifteen. The blue.

Her friend from the same church, two doors along the corridor, does not have one. Nothing at all is said about it. Everything is said about it. All evening she is aware of the ribbon the way a person is aware of a new ring, and by the time she is standing at a strange sink brushing her teeth she has done a small sum in her head that she is ashamed of, and the sum came out in her favor.

And you know that sum. Perhaps it was never a lanyard for you. It was the group chat you were added to, the row you sit in, the person who gets asked to pray at the end and the person who gets asked to stack the chairs, the word somebody used about you once that you have quietly carried ever since. You are safe here, so let us say the true thing gently: the trouble did not start when you wanted to come out well in the sorting. The trouble started the moment you had something to protect. Because from that moment on, you were not free in the room. You were holding a thing with one hand and doing everything else with the other.

What the oil is actually for

Let me name the cost first, because nobody names it and it is heavier than the wanting.

A person carrying something they have to defend cannot rest anywhere. They walk into a room and their eyes go straight to the assessment. They hear a compliment paid to somebody else and feel the floor tilt a degree. They serve, genuinely, and then lie awake auditing whether it was noticed. That is exhausting in a way sleep does not touch, and it is lonely in a peculiar way, because nobody is at home among people they keep quietly ranking themselves against. I am not here to prosecute you for it. You came by it honestly. You live in a world that sorts, and church can sort too, and a person who has been sorted downward often enough learns to want the other end of the line. That is a wound, not a sin to be scolded about.

But it is not what the oil was for, and Paul says so in a sentence he sharpens like a small knife, one the Holy Spirit has been quietly using on proud rooms ever since.

For who sees anything different in you? What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?1 Corinthians 4:7

Three questions and no room to stand between them. Whatever is on you was handed to you. And a gift, by its nature, cannot be a rank, because the giving happened before you were consulted and the choosing was never yours.

So receive this, right now, as a finished thing: what God put on you is already yours and it is not up for review. Nobody's list conferred it and no list can revoke it. I am not saying that to make you feel better; that is what stands written in 1 Corinthians 4:7, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an argument written to a squabbling church in a port city and makes it land on a woman at a strange sink with a blue ribbon still round her neck.

Watch how Moses handles this, because it is the most generous moment in the whole wilderness. The Spirit comes on the seventy elders at the tent, and two men who never made it to the tent, Eldad and Medad, start prophesying in the middle of the camp anyway. A boy runs to tell Moses. Joshua, who loves him, says my lord Moses, stop them. And Moses says: are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord's people were prophets, that the Lord would put his Spirit on them. That is Numbers 11:29. The man with the most to protect in the history of the nation looks at two unauthorized prophets in the camp and says, more of this, please.

He could say it because he knew where the oil came from. You cannot be robbed of something you never earned, and Moses had watched that supply arrive at a burning bush while he was arguing that they had the wrong man.

Which means you have nothing to guard tonight. You have been anointed by the Holy One, and you all know, John writes, and the you is plural and the anointing that you received from him remains in you, 1 John 2:20 and 27. Remains. It is not on loan against your performance this weekend and it does not thin out when somebody else is used. His Spirit is the one who keeps it in you, so there is no hand you need to keep on it.

And the direction of it settles the whole argument. The psalm says the precious oil on the head ran down onto the beard, and down onto the collar of the robe. Psalm 133:2. Oil does not climb. It never once in the history of the world went up a person. It runs down, and off, and onto whatever is beneath it, which means everything God has poured on your life was poured with somebody underneath you in mind. That is not a demotion. That is what it is for.

Now for the part that turns knowing into having, and it hangs on how little Jesus asked for. He did not say bring me a great faith, an impressive faith, a faith with a lanyard on it. He named a seed, one of the smallest things in a farmer's hand, and said speak to the mountain and the mountain moves. Matthew 17:20. Notice what that does to the whole business of ranking. Nobody guards a mustard seed. Nobody builds a standing on one. It is too small to boast about and it is entirely enough, and the Spirit who carries a spoken word does not check what color your ribbon was before He answers it.

So open your mouth. You have the standing to speak over your own heart tonight, because Christ is in you and you were sealed by His Spirit, and the word in your mouth stands on His finished work and not on your position in any room.