He Has Done The Arithmetic

He did it properly, on a Tuesday evening, with a piece of paper.

Ages. Attendance over eleven years, plotted. The giving, adjusted. What the building costs and what it will cost when the roof finally has to be done rather than patched.

He did it three ways, deliberately, to see whether he had made an error somewhere.

The three ways came out within about eighteen months of each other.

He has not said that number to one living person.

Here is what it is like to be in that building on a Sunday.

They are making plans. Somebody wants to do the porch, and there is a proper conversation about it with two quotes, and a woman who has been there fifty years is genuinely excited about the porch.

And he said that sounds good. And he meant it, and he did not mean it, and while she was talking he was running the sum again in his head to see whether the porch changes anything.

That is what he has become in that room.

He is not a pessimist. He wants that on the record. He would be delighted to be wrong, he has looked hard for a reason to be wrong, and if somebody showed him an error in the arithmetic it would be the best hour of his year.

But he cannot unknow it. He sits in a room every week with people who are making plans, holding a number that would change how they felt about the porch, and he has decided not to say it, and he is not sure that decision is right and he is not sure it is wrong.

If you have worked something out that nobody else has, pull up a chair. There is coffee and nobody here is asking for your figures.

Where the verse puts a countable thing

There is a sentence about where to direct attention, and the reason attached to it is the part that will help a man with a piece of paper.

While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.2 Corinthians 4:18

The things which are seen are temporal.

Read what that does and does not do. It does not say the seen things are false. It does not dispute anybody's measurements or suggest the numbers are wrong.

It ranks them by duration. What can be counted is the short lived category. That is all, and it is enough.

Which means your arithmetic is correct and it is also describing the temporal column. Every figure on that paper is a true measurement of something Scripture has already classified as passing.

You are holding an accurate account of things the verse itself calls temporal. 2 Corinthians 4:18 grants that the seen things are real and files them as temporal rather than disputing them, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept both halves of that ranking in one sentence, which means what you worked out on a Tuesday is true and is not the category a Sunday belongs to.

What the sum cannot see

Now the limits of the paper, and this is not a comfort, it is a fact about instruments.

Your arithmetic can see ages, attendance, giving and a roof.

It cannot see what happened in that woman last year. It cannot see whether the man who does the tea would be alive without that room. It has no access to anything that is actually the point, and it never will, because those are not quantities.

That is not a failure of your method. It is the correct behavior of a method applied to what it can reach.

You have measured everything measurable, and the thing the room is for was never in that column. 1 Samuel 16:7 says the Lord seeth not as man seeth, for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart, and it is written of a moment when the visible evidence pointed at entirely the wrong person, and it is the same Spirit who came upon the one nobody had counted, which means the most important variable has never been on your paper.

The decision about the porch

Here is the thing that has never been settled, and it deserves a straight look. You have not told anybody, and you do not know whether that is right. Consider what telling would actually do. It would not change the arithmetic. It would change how a woman of eighty three feels about a porch, in the last years she has, over a projection that has an eighteen month spread in it and depends on assumptions you would be the first to admit are assumptions.

You are not obliged to hand somebody a projection as though it were a fact, and holding it is not the same as hiding it. Deuteronomy 29:29 says the secret things belong unto the Lord our God, but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children, and it draws a line between what is properly held and what is properly shared, and it is the same Spirit who leads into the truth a person can hold, which means the silence you have kept has been judgment and not deceit.

If somebody asks you directly, you tell them. Nobody is suggesting otherwise. Nothing here is a license to mislead a meeting.