The Shutters Go Up and So Does the Faithfulness

The shutter sticks at about waist height and you have to give it a lift with your shoulder, and every person who has ever covered a shift here has been told about the shoulder and every one of them has forgotten.

Sunrise. Crates going out onto the sidewalk. The oranges at the front because the oranges look like money and everybody in this trade knows it.

Two neighbors are already out. One of them is talking to him about a leak. The other is not talking to anybody and has not for eleven years and comes past at this time every single morning and nods.

Six days a week. Same hour. Since his father, and before that his father's cousin.

And something has been going on with him for about three weeks. He has been aware of God in the middle of the day. That is the plainest way to say it. Not in a meeting or a service. Between things. Carrying a crate. Counting a till.

And he is braced, because Thursday is delivery day and Friday is the market and the weekend is the weekend, and he knows what a busy week does. It does not attack anything. It just fills, and then there is no room, and then in two weeks he could not tell you what he was talking about.

Come and hold this end. Because there is a line in a psalm that puts two things at two ends of a day, and I want you to see what the verb is.

Shewed forth, morning and night

Psalm 92 is titled a psalm for the sabbath day and it opens like this.

It is a good thing to give thanks unto the LORD, and to sing praises unto thy name, O most High: To shew forth thy lovingkindness in the morning, and thy faithfulness every night.Psalm 92:2

Read the verb: shew forth. To display, to put on show, to make visible.

And read what is being displayed. Not the man's consistency. Not his devotion. Thy lovingkindness. Thy faithfulness. Two things belonging to God, being made visible at two ends of a day.

Which means what happens in a morning is not a man producing something. It is a man putting something on show that already exists, the way you put crates on a sidewalk. The oranges are not made at six in the morning. They are brought out.

You are bringing out something that already exists rather than producing it, and the two things being shown in that verse belong to Him. That is not a way of making a shopkeeper's routine sound holy; Psalm 92:2 says shew forth Thy lovingkindness and Thy faithfulness, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sabbath psalm and stands it up on a sidewalk at sunrise with crates going out. What you have been afraid of losing is not stored in you.

Now the busy week, and let me be practical because that is the register you live in.

You are braced because busy fills. And that is a true observation about weeks and it is not going to stop being true. Thursday is delivery day and it will be exactly as full as you think.

But look where the psalm puts it. Morning and night. Both ends. The two points of a day that happen regardless of what is in the middle of it.

A busy week cannot fill the moment the shutter goes up, because the shutter going up is the thing that starts the busy week. It is upstream of everything you are afraid of.

You have two points in a day that a busy week cannot reach, and both of them happen no matter what is in the middle. Psalm 92:2 puts it in the morning and every night, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes those two hinges of an ordinary day into the exact place the arrangement sits.

Every night, and what that admits

One more thing, because it is the part that lets a man off.

And thy faithfulness every night. Notice that the psalm gives a morning line and a night line, and it gives the night one to faithfulness.

That is not decoration. Faithfulness is the word you use about somebody who kept going through something. You do not praise a man for faithfulness on his best day; you praise him for it after a long stretch.

So the psalm is already assuming a day in which things happened. It expects the middle to be full. And at the end of a full one it hands you the word faithfulness, which is exactly the word for a day that got away from you.

You are given a word at the end of a full day that was made for full days, and faithfulness was never a word for easy stretches. Psalm 92:2 puts faithfulness at night on purpose, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an evening after a delivery day the right place for that word rather than the wrong one.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it works while your hands are full.

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 much room a week leaves you. 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.