Wakened the Way a Man Is Wakened

Half past six and the office above the shop still has its lamp on, because the overhead one flickers and has flickered since his father's time and nobody has ever done anything about it.

Three ledgers. The current one open, the last two on the shelf behind him with the years on the spines in his own handwriting. A calculator with a roll of paper. A tin of pens, most of which do not work, which he knows and has never sorted out.

He is good at this. That is not vanity, it is a fact about a man and his hands. The books have never once been wrong. When his cousin took over the front of the shop, the first thing his cousin said was that at least the accounts would be right, and it was said with love.

He puts the pen down and rubs his eyes and thinks the thought that has been arriving more often lately, and it goes like this.

I do everything a believer does. I have not missed a week. I say the right things and I mean them as far as I can tell. And I cannot remember the last time any of it was alive in me. So which am I? A believer, or a very reliable man?

He would not put that to anyone. It sounds ungrateful and it sounds unstable and he is neither. And he is quietly, genuinely afraid that if he ever did put it to God, what would come back would be an examination. A going through the books. Which is a thing he could bear from anybody except God.

Friend, close the ledger for four minutes. There is a prophet in Scripture who had to be woken twice in one chapter, and nobody audited him either time.

He had to be woken, and the text says so plainly

Zechariah is a working prophet in the middle of his own book. He has already had seven visions in a row. Nobody would say this man was distant from God.

And then chapter four opens like this.

And the angel that talked with me came again, and waked me, as a man that is wakened out of his sleep.Zechariah 4:1

Sit with that comparison for a second, because it is the writer's own, not mine. As a man that is wakened out of his sleep. He is telling us how it felt: heavy, disoriented, the way anybody is when somebody puts a hand on them in the dark.

This is a prophet mid book. He has not lapsed. There is no rebuke in the chapter, no explanation demanded, no going through the record of the previous seven visions to see where the slippage began. He is simply woken, and the vision proceeds.

You are woken and not examined, and the man in that chapter was a working prophet who still needed somebody to come and do it. That is not a lenient reading of Zechariah 4:1; the text supplies the comparison itself and supplies no complaint at all, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line out of a small prophet and lays it across a man in an office above a shop at half past six. Nobody is opening your books.

Now let me deal with the actual question you asked, because it deserves an answer and not a reassurance.

You asked whether you are a believer or a reliable man. The question assumes that liveliness is the evidence, and that in its absence the only thing left to examine is behavior. But look at what the vision he is woken up to see actually is.

A lampstand of gold. Seven lamps burning on it. And an olive tree on either side, with pipes running oil out of the trees, into the bowl, into the lamps.

There is nobody carrying oil in that picture. In every other lampstand in Israel's worship a priest walks over with a jar, morning and evening, forever. In this one the oil arrives by itself, through pipes, and the lamps burn all night on a supply that no human being is maintaining.

You are a lamp in that vision, and you were never the one carrying the jar. Zechariah 4:6 says not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes that sentence and makes it a fact in a man rather than a slogan on a wall. The light being real has never depended on the lampkeeper's enthusiasm.

Reliability is not the opposite of alive

One more thing, and it is for the man specifically, because I think you have been holding two words apart that belong together.

You have set reliability and aliveness against each other, as though the presence of one proves the absence of the other. But Scripture is full of people whose faithfulness ran long past their feelings, and it never once treats that as a lesser condition. It treats it as the ordinary condition of a servant.

Think of the word used of the man in the parable: good and faithful. Not good and enthusiastic. And think what your own hands have actually done through the flat stretch. Every week. Every entry. Nobody made you.

You have been faithful through a stretch you got nothing out of, and God is not in the habit of overlooking that. Hebrews 6:10 says God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a promise that specific land on a man who assumed his own steadiness counted for nothing. Your reliability was never evidence against you. It was evidence of something.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it does more than read figures out loud.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. He picked the smallest measurable thing available. Not the warmth of a man at a desk. Not what you can currently feel about any of it. 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.