Apologizing For How Small It Is

They come through the gate and he has started talking before anybody has looked at anything.

It is not much. It used to be a lot bigger. There were forty of us at one point, you should have seen it, this is nothing compared to what it was, do not judge it by tonight.

All of that, at the gate, before a single person has sat down.

Here is the part that ought to be said first, because otherwise this reads as a story about a man who has given up, and it is the opposite.

He started.

He is one of the very few people in this story who actually did. When it came apart, most people drifted, which is what people do and nobody blames them. He got two tables out of a shed and strung a light between two walls and sent about nine messages, and there were four people the first evening and one of them only came because she had misread the message.

There are eleven now. On a good week, fourteen.

And every single time somebody new comes through that gate, he apologizes to them before they have taken their coat off.

His cousin said something to him about it three weeks ago. He said, primo, stop telling me it is small. I can see how big it is. I have got eyes.

And he laughed, and said I know, I know.

And then he did it again, at the same gate, to the next person who came, about forty minutes later, and he heard himself doing it while it was happening and could not stop.

If you hand people a disclaimer before you hand them a chair, come in and sit down. Nobody here is going to be told anything about the size of this.

Who put the word least in that sentence

There is a parable everybody knows, and the detail worth noticing is not the tree at the end. It is an adjective at the start, and of all the people who could have chosen it, Christ chose it Himself.

The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field: which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs.Matthew 13:31-32

Which indeed is the least of all seeds.

He said that. Nobody made Him. He could have compared the kingdom of heaven to anything at all, and He picked the smallest thing in the field and then said out loud, in the same breath, that it is the smallest thing in the field.

There is no apology anywhere in it. He is not embarrassed by the comparison and He does not soften it. The smallness is stated as a plain feature, and then He goes straight on.

You are standing in a comparison that Christ made without one word of apology for its size. Matthew 13:32 has Him naming the least of all seeds as the picture of the kingdom, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept that adjective in the sentence rather than removing it, which means the smallness of what is in your courtyard has already been said out loud by somebody with more authority than you, and He said it as a description rather than as a warning.

What the apology is actually doing

Now the gate, because there is a mechanism in it and it is worth naming plainly.

The apology is protection. It is not modesty and it is not honesty, though it wears both of those.

If you tell somebody it is small before they see it, you cannot be disappointed by their reaction, because you got there first. You have pre-agreed with whatever they might have thought. Nobody can look around and find it wanting, because you have already found it wanting on their behalf and out loud. It works, and that is exactly why it is so hard to stop.

You have been guarding yourself with a sentence, and the guarding costs the people who came. Proverbs 29:25 says the fear of man bringeth a snare, but whoso putteth his trust in the Lord shall be safe, and it names the fear of what people will think as a trap rather than as good manners, and it is the same Spirit who gives boldness in the book of Acts to people with very little, so what happens at that gate is a snare and it is not humility.

What the eleven are actually walking into

Here is a thing worth turning round, because it changes what those evenings are.

Every person who comes through that gate is walking into a thing that exists.

It did not exist eighteen months ago. Two tables came out of a shed because one man decided they would. A light got strung up. Somebody who misread a message came anyway and is still coming.

You were given something to build and you built it, and the people at those tables are standing in the evidence. 1 Corinthians 3:6 says I have planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase, and it puts the planting and the growing in different hands entirely, and it is the same Spirit who makes anything alive at all, which means the size of what is in that courtyard was never on your side of the arrangement.