Four Years of Sermons in a Van

Twelve forty and the van is parked up at the end where the ground is flat, side door open, and Mark is in the driver's seat with the sandwich his wife makes him and does not have to.

He is thirty-nine. Electrician, mostly domestic, sometimes a small commercial job, on his own eleven of the last thirteen years.

He listens to preaching all day.

That is not an exaggeration or a nice way of saying he has the radio on sometimes. He listens all day, for four years now, and he has got through a genuinely staggering quantity of it. A whole series on one letter, forty parts, twice. Conference sets. A man in America who does forty minutes every weekday and never repeats himself. Somebody dead who was recorded on tape in the seventies and sounds like it.

And it has done something. This is not a story about a man wasting four years.

He knows things now. He can tell you the shape of an argument he could not have followed at thirty-five. Something got straightened out in him about two years ago that had been crooked since he was a boy, and it got straightened out on the A road between two jobs by a man who has been dead since 2004.

He would say, and he would be right, that those four years have been the best four years of his faith.

And at about ten to one, with the engine off and the door open and the sandwich finished, it is completely silent in that cab.

Which is when the thing he has noticed comes back round again.

Nobody says anything back.

Four years of input and not one word of response. He has never once said, to a person, out loud, that thing that got straightened out. He does not have anybody to say it to, and he did not lose anybody, it is simply that the arrangement of his life has no slot in it for that conversation.

And there is a second thing under it that arrived a few months ago and that he has not been able to shift.

He cannot remember the last time anybody asked him a question about God.

Not a challenge. Not a debate. Just a question, from a person, to him, about any of it.

You have that silence. Yours might not have a van in it. But you know how much has gone in, and you know roughly how much has come back out, and you know the ratio is not what it should be.

Two words and a frequency

Hebrews 3 is in the middle of a warning about people who heard everything and still did not arrive, and the instruction the writer gives to prevent it is not the one anybody expects.

But exhort one another daily, while it is called To day; lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin.Hebrews 3:13

Exhort one another.

The direction is mutual. It is not: get good teaching, which he could easily have said and which would have been reasonable advice in a letter this dense.

And then, daily. Which is a frequency, and it is a very high one, and it rules out most of the arrangements people build their spiritual lives around. Daily is not a Sunday and it is not a conference and it is not forty parts on a hard drive.

You are given an instruction that is mutual and daily, and neither half of it can be done with headphones on. That is the written word and not my read of your lunch break, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a warning from the middle of Hebrews and lays it in a cab at ten to one with the door open.

Now the reason, which is the part that ought to make a careful man sit up.

The deceitfulness of it

Lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin.

He does not say: exhort one another because otherwise you will be lonely. Loneliness is not the argument.

He says: because hardening is deceitful.

That word is doing everything. Deceitful means you cannot see it. It is not a warning about something that will announce itself; it is a warning about something whose entire nature is that the person it is happening to does not detect it.

Which means the instrument God has given for a thing you cannot see in yourself is another person.

Not more input. You cannot detect your own hardening with more information, however good, because the faculty doing the detecting is the faculty that is going. That is what deceitful means.

You have been given another person as the instrument, and it is already yours to use. Hebrews 3 gives the deceitfulness as the reason for the one another in exactly that order, and the same Spirit who says today in the verse before is the one making it a present fact in a man in a driver's seat with the engine off.

Now let me guard this properly.

I am not telling you the four years were a mistake. They were not. What went in went in, and it straightened something out in you that needed straightening, and God was in a van on an A road doing that through a man who has been dead for twenty years.

And I am not telling you the answer is to be at more things. This site does not make attendance the answer and Hebrews is not describing a meeting. Daily and one another is a description of a person, not a program, and one person is enough to start.

And if you are reading this genuinely isolated, with a job like yours and a shift pattern like yours and no one within reach, you are not outside this. The naming today can be somebody four hundred miles off and the one thing can be a phone call.

What I am telling you is that four years of a one directional arrangement has a specific risk attached to it in Scripture, and the risk is not that you get bored. It is that you cannot see the one thing you most need to see, and you were never designed to see it on your own.