The Kind Of Person He Does Not Do

Second Friday of the month and the front room is full. Coats piled on the bed in the back. The kettle going for the third time. Somebody's kid asleep sideways in the good chair and nobody moving him.

Ed has been on his feet for two hours and he has not sat down once, which is how he likes it. He took the coats. He found the extra folding chairs. He noticed that the man from two streets over does not know anybody and put him next to Terry, who talks to anyone, and it worked, and Ed is quietly pleased about it in the way a man is pleased about a joint that fits.

Ask anybody in that room about Ed and you will get the same answer. He would do anything for you. And they are not being polite. He would. He has.

At nine forty there is a knock and Charlene calls out that it is open, and somebody says, over their shoulder, coming in, I brought somebody, hope that is all right.

And something in Ed goes flat.

Not cold. Nobody in that room could see it, and that is the whole point. He crosses to the door. He puts out his hand. He is warm and he is easy and he says the right thing, and he is being polite in a way that is different from how he was being polite forty seconds ago, and there is exactly one person in the house who knows the difference.

Later, with everybody gone, stacking chairs against the wall in the way they go so they do not scratch the paint, he has a thought so ordinary he does not even catch it going by.

I do plenty for people. I just do not do that kind.

He has never said it out loud. Not to Charlene, not in prayer, not in the truck with the radio off. It has never once been an argument he had with himself, because you cannot have an argument with something you have not admitted is there.

But the rule is running. It has been running for years. And it is beautifully behaved: it never makes a scene, never says anything unkind, never has to be defended. It just decides, quietly, about forty seconds early, every single time.

You have one. You may have had to sit still for a second there to find it, and you may have found it faster than you would like. Not a person, a kind. A sort of situation, a sort of trouble, a sort of person you long ago worked out you are not going to get involved with, and you have never said it in a sentence, and it has been running underneath a genuinely generous life for years without anybody, including you, ever calling it in.

The Rule Nobody Ever Has To Defend

The first thing to say is that this is not a scolding, and if you are braced for one you can let that go now.

You are not a mean man. That is not what is being uncovered here. What is being uncovered is a rule, and a rule is a different object from a character, which is very good news, because a character takes a lifetime and a rule takes a sentence.

And notice how the rule survived. It survived by never being said. Anything you say out loud gets weighed. Anything you never say just runs.

You are holding a decision that was made a long time ago and has never once been reviewed. Proverbs 11:17 is a sentence about what a settled habit does inside the man who keeps it, not about anybody's deserving, and the Spirit who has been kind to you every second Friday for years is not the one who wrote that clause into your evenings.

A man who is kind benefits himself, but a cruel man hurts himself.Proverbs 11:17

Before anybody turns that into a transaction, look hard at what it does not say. It does not say the person you were kind to pays you back. It does not say God ends up owing you. Nothing in this message promises you a return of any kind, in any currency, and if you go looking for one you have misread both the proverb and me.

What it says is that a disposition does something to the man carrying it. The second half is where the weight is: the cruel man troubles his own flesh. Mercy is not a tax you pay out of your one life. It is closer to the way a house is built. And a standing rule that decides in advance about a whole kind of person is a small piece of grit that has been sitting in a warm and generous man's chest for years, doing quiet work.

You have been generous with almost everybody and carrying one closed clause, and the clause is the only thing under discussion. That is Scripture rather than my opinion of you, and the Holy Spirit is what makes the difference between a rule being exposed and a man being accused.

He Did Not Scold Peter Either

Now watch how God handles this exact thing, because how He handles it is most of the message.

There was a man with a rule. A serious one, a lifelong one, held sincerely, in good conscience, with real reasons behind it. And God did not stand him up and correct him.

He waited until the man was hungry. Then He gave him a vision full of food, and told him to eat, three times, and let him argue about it, and did not raise His voice once. And afterward there were men at the gate and a walk to a house and a whole afternoon before Peter came out with it: God has shown me that I should not call any person common or unclean.

Look at the pacing of that. No rebuke. No shaming. A meal, a conversation, an argument God was perfectly content to have, and a man arriving under his own power at a sentence he had never said out loud in his life.

You are being dealt with the same way and there is no rebuke anywhere in it. Acts 10:28 has Peter working it out on his feet in somebody's front room rather than on his knees under a lecture, and the Spirit who was speaking to him the whole time was the one who arranged the hunger, the roof and the timing.

And here is where the thing gets its edge, because this is not sentimentality.

You were never appointed to sort people before they arrive. No line of mine could relieve you of that; it is written in Acts 10:34 that God shows no partiality, and partiality is precisely a decision made about a kind rather than about a person, and the same Spirit who put that sentence in Peter's mouth is not asking you to run a door He never gave you.

Now the other half, and I want it just as loud, because this is the category where an open door gets preached badly.

A door has a frame. It has hinges and it has a latch, and none of that is a failure of hospitality; it is what makes a door a door instead of a hole in a wall. Nothing here asks you to let harm into your house. Nothing here asks you to be near anybody who is dangerous to be near, or to stay in a room where you or your family are not safe. If that is the situation, the merciful thing is not endurance, it is help, and no verse in this message says otherwise.

You are allowed a frame and a latch, and you are being asked to give up a filter. Those are different objects; Romans 12:13 tells us to seek to show hospitality, seek being an active verb about going out looking, and the Holy Spirit is well able to keep a house safe without a man running a private list at the door.