The Eighth Year Of Temporary

Rusty still calls it temporary, and it started in the spring of the year his daughter was in fourth grade, and she graduated in June.

Nobody in that family calls it anything else either. It is not a lie anybody tells. It is simply the word that got attached to the thing at the beginning, when it genuinely was temporary, and the word stayed on it the way a name stays on a dog you got for somebody else.

The arrangement itself is not the interesting part and I am not going to say much about it, because yours is different and if I describe his you will spend the whole message deciding whether yours qualifies. It was a thing he took on to get through a stretch. It worked. It got them through the stretch.

The stretch ended about six years ago.

He worked this out in a hardware store, standing in an aisle, when a man he had not seen in a while asked him how it was going, and Rusty heard himself say "oh, it is just for now", and the other fellow nodded and moved on, and Rusty stood there holding a length of chain.

Just for now. Eight years.

Now, the thing to see here is not that Rusty is stuck. That is the obvious reading and it is the wrong one, and it would make this a message about courage, and it is not.

The thing to see is what that word has been buying him.

Because as long as it is temporary, he never has to decide. He does not have to be a man who chose this, and he does not have to be a man who is leaving. He gets to be a man who is passing through, which is a third position, and the third position is very comfortable and costs nothing at all until you add up the years.

Temporary is not a description of his situation. Temporary is the arrangement. It is the thing that lets him hold two answers at once, and go on holding them, without either one ever having to be true.

And he is tired. That is the part he would tell you about if you got him talking. Not tired from the work, which he can do standing on his head by now. Tired the way a man is tired who has been carrying something in both hands for eight years and has never once put either down.

You have your own. There is something in your life you are still calling temporary, and the season it was temporary for has been over for a while, and the word is doing work for you that you have never once looked at directly.

Nobody is calling you a coward. There is nothing cowardly here.

But the word has been costing you, and it has been charging quietly, the way words do.

The prophet's question is not about idols. It is about the limping.

There is a scene on a mountain where a man asks a crowd a question, and everybody remembers the fire and almost nobody remembers the sentence.

How long halt ye between two opinions? if the LORD be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him. And the people answered him not a word.1 Kings 18:21

That word halt is the word for limping. He is not accusing them of worshipping something else, not at that moment. He is describing a gait. He is saying: look at how you are walking. You are going along with your weight never settled on either foot, and you have been doing it so long you think it is walking.

And notice what he offers them. Not one option. Two. He says follow the Lord, or follow the other, but for the sake of your own bones stop doing this.

And the people answered him not a word, which is the most human line in the chapter, because there is no good answer to that question when you have been limping for years. There is only the silence of a person who has just recognized his own walk.

Now hear what is already true over you standing in that silence. You are not being asked to become decisive. That is not the demand: the written word says God gives one heart and one way to His own, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a man in a hardware aisle holding a length of chain.

And the limp is not who you are. The word says He is the one who works in you to will and to do of His good pleasure, and the Spirit is the one doing that work, which means the settling of your weight is not a thing you have to manufacture at fifty-three after eight years of practice at the opposite.

Nobody is telling you to quit anything

Now I am going to be very plain, because this is exactly where a message like this starts spending a family's money from a comfortable distance, and I have seen the damage that does and I will not do it.

Nobody here is telling you to leave. Not the arrangement, not the work, not the town. I do not know what you are carrying, who leans on you, or what a change would cost the people in your house, and a man who preaches a resignation he will never have to pay for is not ministering, he is enjoying himself.

Elijah did not tell that crowd to move house. He told them to stop limping. Those are entirely different instructions, and only one of them was in his mouth.

And I am not going to tell you the arrangement is wrong, either. It may well be exactly where God has you and it may be the most faithful eight years anybody in your family has ever put in. Faithful is not the same as stuck, and a great many people who look stuck are simply keeping a promise nobody clapped for.

So hear what is not required. You do not have to know what you are going to do. Nothing in Scripture makes God's nearness wait on your having a plan, and the Spirit of God has never once stood off from a man who was still working out what was true.

And you already have one Master. Not once the situation resolves: the word says you are not your own, you were bought at a price, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit that this is settled ground and not a thing to be earned.

The other one has never paid you a wage. Not one. It has never once kept anybody, and the written word says riches take wings and fly away, and the Spirit can make a man feel that without a single thing being taken off him to demonstrate it.