I Still Cannot Find Habakkuk

Eight of them in a front room on a Wednesday, in a circle that is not really a circle because of where the sofa is, which is how every home group in the history of the church has been arranged.

A plate of sliced fruit going round that somebody's wife cut up and that everybody is being polite about and slowly demolishing. A lamp on in the corner. A woman who asks the question everybody was thinking and nobody wanted to be the one to ask.

And a man of forty-seven with his Bible open on his knee and his thumb, very quietly, in the contents page.

Because the guy leading has just said Habakkuk, and around that circle seven pairs of hands went to roughly the right place without looking, the way you reach for a light switch in your own hallway. And his did not, because it never has, because he did not grow up with any of this.

He came to faith three years ago at forty-four. It was real and it was the best thing that ever happened to him and he would tell anyone who asked.

But there are these moments, and there are more of them than anybody knows. The songs everybody else knows the second verse of. The story about the guy in the fiery furnace that everybody has apparently known since they were six. The way somebody says a phrase and the whole room nods and he files it away to look up later.

And out of a thousand small moments like that, he has assembled a conclusion he has never said out loud: that there are people who are really part of this, and there are people like him who arrived from outside and are being generously accommodated, and that the difference is something you cannot make up in three years or thirty.

What is not going to happen here

Let me put this down first, because you are already braced.

Nothing on this page is going to tell you what your gift is. Not by naming it, not by describing you closely enough that you take it as a diagnosis, and not with a list at the end you can measure yourself against. There is no questionnaire and there is no kinder version of one.

And nothing here is going to hand you a reading plan or a shortcut or a way to catch up. That is not what the ache is about, and you know it, and being handed a program right now would only confirm the thing you are afraid of.

You are not being accommodated in this body, and there is no catching up that has to happen before you are properly in it. That is not me being generous with you. Scripture is what says it, and the Holy Spirit has never once graded a man's fluency before He would deal with him.

The chapter is about a body, and a body is not a school

Here is the thing about the image Paul chose, and he chose it deliberately over about six other images he could have used.

He could have said the church is like an army, and then rank and training would be the point. He could have said a school, and then knowing things would be the point. He could have said a household, and then how long you had lived there would be the point.

He said a body.

For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ.1 Corinthians 12:12

A body has no curriculum. A foot did not learn its way in. There is no part of you that is a full member of you because it studied.

You belong to this body the way a hand belongs to an arm, and there is no examination anywhere in that sentence that a person could still be failing. I did not invent that reading. 1 Corinthians 12:12 chose an organism over an institution, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a choice like that land in a man with his thumb in a contents page.

The verse that says necessary

Then Paul does something that must have caused an argument in the room when it was first read out.

Nay, much more those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary.1 Corinthians 12:22

Read it slowly. Which seem to be more feeble. Not which are. Which seem.

He is talking about how a body looks to the people inside it. There are parts that look like they are carrying the thing and parts that look like they are being carried, and Paul says the ones that look like they are being carried are the ones the body cannot do without.

Necessary. Not welcome. Not accommodated. Not made to feel at home. Necessary, which is a word about what a thing cannot function without.

You are necessary in this body right now, at three years in, with the contents page under your thumb, and that is not a kindness anybody is extending to you, it is the word's own verdict. I am not softening it and I am not stretching it. 1 Corinthians 12:22 says necessary, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a word like that and presses it into a person until they can feel the weight of it.

Set, and not by fluency

And then the sentence everybody quotes.

But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him.1 Corinthians 12:18

God set. Not the years of Sunday school you did not have. Not the family that did not take you. Not the songs you do not know the second verse of.

Every one of them. Individually, by name.

As it hath pleased Him. A decision, taken on purpose, by somebody who wanted it exactly this way, and who was not short of well-catechized volunteers when He chose you.

You were set in this body by God Himself at forty-four, deliberately, and not one item on the long list of things you do not know was ever a condition of it. That is what 1 Corinthians 12:18 says in the plainest words the language had, and the Spirit who inspired it is the one who makes a written line hold weight in a man on a Wednesday night.

And this is not a reason to stop learning. Learn everything. Find Habakkuk. That is a good and joyful thing and you will love it. It is just not the thing that put you here, and it never was for anybody in that room.