The lights on that field come on at seven and go off at nine and you can see them from the highway if you know where to look, and Marco knows where to look.
He drives past it every Thursday. He does not plan to. It is not on his route home and it is a left turn he could easily not make, and he makes it every week, and tonight he pulls over onto the gravel and puts the hazards on and sits there with the engine off.
Nine years he played in that game. Same field, same crowd, an entirely unofficial thing that has been going since before he moved to the neighborhood. Old guys, young guys, whoever turns up. Somebody's cousin. Two brothers who argue the entire ninety minutes and drive home together.
He stopped going eighteen months ago.
The reason had a shape at the time. The locker room talk got to him. Not in a vague way. Marco was good at that talk, better than most of them, and it fed something in him he had decided he was finished feeding. He said something about it once, on a Thursday, badly, in the wrong tone, and it landed like a wet towel, and a guy called Tito said something back that was not cruel but was not kind either, and Marco laughed it off and went home and did not go back.
He told himself he had made a decision. And for about three weeks it felt like one.
Since then it has felt like nothing at all. Not peace. Not victory. Just a Thursday that used to have something in it, and does not, and a man driving past a fence with the engine off.
And what he has never quite let himself think, until tonight, sitting in the gravel with the moths going up into the floodlights, is that he did not leave over a conviction he could name to God out loud. He left because being the one different man in that room was harder than not being in it.
You have parked outside that fence. Your Thursday was something else, a lunch, a family group, a shift with a certain crew. But you know the difference between a decision and an exit, and you know which one you made.
A command that cannot be obeyed alone
Romans 12 is a chapter of short instructions fired one after another, and one of them has your name on it tonight.
If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.Romans 12:18
Take the middle clause first, because it is the one nobody quotes. As much as lieth in you. Paul puts the entire weight of that peace on the reader's side of the table. Not, if they behave. Not, if the room is worthy of you. As much as depends on you, which is a phrase that only makes sense if you are still standing in front of somebody.
And then look at the last three words, which decide the address. With all men. Not with the ones who make it easy.
You have been handed a command that has no version of itself for an empty room. That is the written word and not my read on your Thursday, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line from a letter to Rome and sets it down on the gravel outside a chain link fence.
That is the thing to see. You cannot obey Romans 12:18 alone. It is not that obeying it alone is harder. It is that there is no way to do it. The verse requires other people to be present before it can be started, and you have arranged your week so that it cannot begin.
Read the rest of the chapter and count the empty rooms
Try it with the verses on either side. Bless them which persecute you. Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep. Be of the same mind one toward another. Condescend to men of low estate. Recompense to no man evil for evil. Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.
Every one of them needs somebody else in the room. Every single one. There is not a command in that entire chapter that a man alone in a truck can carry out.
You are being asked for something that only exists among people, and it is already yours to do. Romans 12 stacks them up one after another and not one of them is solitary, and the same Spirit who moved Paul to write them is the one making them a present fact in a man sitting in gravel with his hazards on.
Now I will guard it, because a man can hear this as a license and it is not one. There are rooms that take a person apart, and Scripture never once pretends otherwise, and if a place genuinely dismantles you then leaving it is wisdom and not cowardice and I would tell my own brother the same. Some of you are reading this and the answer for you really is that you do not go back, and that is not a failure of this message.
But be exact about what happened in your case, because most of us are not exact and that is where it goes wrong. You did not leave a room that dismantled you. You left a room where being different was uncomfortable, and you have called the discomfort holiness for eighteen months, and it has not made you holier. It has only made you alone on a Thursday.
So here is what happens now, on the gravel, with the lights on and the moths going up and ten minutes of the game still to run.
You are going to be the difference in the room instead of the absence from it. Because the thing you have been calling set apart has no verse under it, and the chapter that actually governs your Thursday puts the peace on your side and puts you in a crowd to do it.
This is yours right now, as you read, and it does not wait for the room to improve. Romans 12 says as much as lieth in you, and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds a man's mouth and his temper in a locker room, which is a thing He has been doing for people for two thousand years.
You are not going back to join in. You are going back to be in it. Nobody in that game needs you to be who you were at twenty-nine. Several of them may need you to be who you are now, standing there, saying almost nothing.
Declare this over yourself
Say these three out loud. The authority to speak them is yours because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, not because you left any room, and Scripture is the ground under every word while the Holy Spirit carries it. Jesus said speak to the mountain and do not doubt in the heart. So speak, and leave what He does on that field to Him, in His own way and His own time.
- Thursday I gave up eighteen months ago, you were never holiness. Scripture says as much as lieth in you live peaceably with all men, and that sentence cannot even be started in an empty room.
- Fear that I will sound like them again, get out, in the name of Jesus. Romans 12 puts the whole weight of the peace on my side and it is written exactly that way, and the Holy Spirit is the One who keeps my mouth, not my absence from a field.
- Lord, You put me among these men on purpose and You did the putting, and I thank You that every command in that chapter needs somebody else standing there. Your word says live peaceably with all men, and Your Spirit is the one going in with me. I am getting my boots out of the trunk.
Romans 12:18
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