Today I Must Stay at Your House

The scorebook has a spiral top and a rubber band round it and a pencil pushed through the spiral, and the pencil is the good one, and everybody knows not to take the good one.

Bottom of the fourth. He has the whole thing down. Every at bat, the substitutions, the pitching change in the second, the ground out that the other coach argued about. Anybody could pick this book up in ten years and know exactly what happened here tonight.

The boy is on second. His boy. Well, his daughter's boy, but you know how that works.

And two innings ago the boy did something. He got on with a hit that went past the shortstop and there was a whole thing about it, the bench standing up, the boy pointing at somebody, the mother two rows down shouting something. He has it written in the book, correctly, in the right column.

He did not see it. He was writing down the previous play.

That is the shape of most of his evenings now, and if he is honest it is the shape of a good deal more than the evenings. He is the one who keeps the record. He always has been. And keeping the record has quietly become the way he attends anything, which means he is at everything and present at nothing.

Now, before you tell me a man his age cannot change how he does a thing, let me take you up a tree in Jericho, because there was a fellow up one who had the opposite problem and got the same word said to him.

The man in the tree came to see

Zacchaeus is short and rich and unpopular, and a crowd has come down the road, and he does something no man of his standing would do, which is climb.

And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up, and saw him, and said unto him, Zacchaeus, make haste, and come down; for to day I must abide at thy house.Luke 19:5

Two things in that sentence, and I want both.

The first is the word today. He says it in the verse and then Luke has Him say it again a few lines later: this day is salvation come to this house. Twice, in one visit. He is not a man who deals in general terms. He came to a road on a particular afternoon and did a particular thing in a particular house.

The second is what the man in the tree was up there for. He was not up there to have a record of the day. He was up there to see. He wanted his own eyes on it, and the wanting cost him his dignity in front of the whole town, and that is exactly what got noticed.

You are wanted at the actual event and not at the account of it, and the word He used about it was today. That is not a warm reading laid over a Gospel; Luke 19:5 has Him saying today, out loud, twice in one visit, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an afternoon in Jericho and stands it up on a bleacher at the bottom of the fourth. He does not deal in summaries. He never has.

Now let me say the second thing, and it is for a man with a pencil in his hand.

Record keeping is not a small or shabby thing. Somebody has to do it. Half the Bible is a record and God is plainly in favor of them. But a record is a thing made about a moment, and it is made from a small distance, and the distance is the price of the accuracy.

You have been paying that price on everything. Not on purpose. It is what a reliable man drifts into, because being the one who has it written down is a real service and it is also, quietly, a way of being at a thing without being got at by it.

You have been paying a small distance on everything you love, and nobody is charging you it any more. The written word says the Lord is at hand, be careful for nothing (Philippians 4:5), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes at hand mean an arm's length rather than a doctrine. You do not have to be at the safe distance to be useful in this family.

What the word today actually does

One more thing, and then we will go to the part that matters.

Today is a word that will not let you plan. You cannot prepare for today, you can only be in it. That is why it appears where it does, all over Scripture, at exactly the moments when somebody is about to postpone something.

Today if ye will hear his voice (Psalm 95:7). Now is the accepted time (2 Corinthians 6:2). Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof (Matthew 6:34). The book keeps handing people a day, singular, and taking the rest off the table.

And it is a mercy, when you see it. Because a man who has been half absent for a long stretch cannot get the past back, and being handed today is the only offer that does not require him to.

You have today handed to you clean, and nothing about it depends on the innings you have already written down. Psalm 95:7 says today if ye will hear His voice, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes today a real place a man can stand in rather than a word in a psalm. The book is not asking you for the last ten years. It is offering you an evening.

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

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. Smallest seed a man ever put in the ground. Not the quality of your attention at sixty. 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 it works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.