My Father Is Still Working in This Garage

The roller door goes up at ten past seven and for about four minutes the sun comes in flat along the floor and lights up every bit of dust in the place, and then it climbs and the day starts properly.

Three bays. A radio that only gets one station properly. His uncle's name on the sign outside and his uncle's chair in the corner that nobody else sits in even now.

He is good with his hands. Everybody says it and it is true and it took years. There is a Volvo in bay two with a noise nobody else could find and he found it on Tuesday by listening.

And here is where he has quietly arrived, and he could not tell you the month it happened.

This is a garage. It is oil and invoices and a man on the phone about a courtesy car. Whatever God is doing in the world, He is doing it in the places where God gets done, and this is not one of them. So there are two parts to his week: the part that is about God, which is Sunday and about eleven minutes on a Wednesday, and the rest, which is this, and which is just time passing.

He would not say he was unhappy. He would say he was marking time. Fifty hours a week of it.

Hermano, sit on the stool by the compressor a minute. Because Jesus was accused of something once, and the sentence He answered with is the shortest and best thing anybody ever said about a working day.

The sentence He answered the accusation with

He heals a man at a pool on the sabbath and the authorities come at Him for working on the wrong day.

Now, He could have argued the law. He could have quoted precedent. Instead He says this.

My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.John 5:17

Nine words. Read the first half slowly. My Father worketh hitherto. Up until now. Continuously. Without a break. God has been working, from the beginning, right up to this exact moment, and has never yet stopped.

And then, on the back of that, and I work. His own working is not a separate category. It is a continuation of a working that was already going on.

Now put yourself in that sentence, because you are in it. If the Father has been working hitherto and has not stopped, then He is working somewhere at ten past seven on a Tuesday. And He does not have a separate premises for it.

You are standing on a floor where the Father has not stopped working, and He has never once had a building He does His working in. That is not a nice thought about vocation; John 5:17 says my Father worketh hitherto and puts no boundary on where, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sabbath argument in Jerusalem and stands it up in a garage with the roller door going up. This place is not outside the work. There is no outside.

Now the second half, and it is the split you have been living with.

You divided your week into the part that is about God and the part that is just time passing. That division feels obvious and it is not in the book anywhere. The people in Scripture are shepherds and fishermen and a tentmaker and a doctor and a tax man, and God speaks to almost all of them at work, because work is where they were.

The division did not come from Scripture. It came from the fact that nobody has ever stood in a garage and told you the truth about it.

You have been living by a split that is not in the text, and the ordinary hours were never the leftover ones. Colossians 3:23 says whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes as to the Lord an actual redirection of fifty hours a week rather than a slogan for a workshop wall.

What He is doing in a place like this

Let me be careful and not sell you anything.

I am not going to tell you God has a special plan for your garage or that revival is going to break out in bay two. I do not know that and neither do you.

Here is what I do know, from the text, and it is bigger and duller and more solid than a prediction.

He is upholding that building and everybody in it by the word of His power (Hebrews 1:3). He is giving to all life and breath and all things (Acts 17:25). A man came in this morning worried about money and left with a car that works and a bill that was fair, because somebody in that building is honest, and honesty is not a neutral fact about a business, it is something of God happening in a room.

You are part of something of God going on in that place every day, and honest work is not a preliminary to the real thing. Proverbs 11:1 says a false balance is abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is His delight, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes delight a live word about an invoice rather than a religious feeling.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it does more than quote a price.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed there is. Not how spiritual your job sounds when you say it out loud. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.