White Already, and Nobody Looking Up

There is a table tennis table with one bat missing and a net that has been at half mast since Easter, and every week somebody says they will bring a bat and nobody does.

Half nine. Everyone has gone. Two beanbags need putting back and there is a crisp packet under the radiator and she will get it in a minute.

Twenty three there tonight. That is a good number and she knows it is a good number and she cannot make herself feel it.

Because here is what she has decided about this room, and she decided it a while ago and has been quietly living by it since: nothing is happening here. They come, they eat everything, they are loud, they are kind to each other in the specific way teenagers are kind, and then they go home and nothing that anybody says in the ten minutes in the middle appears to make any difference to anything.

She still does it. She turns up, she buys the food out of her own money more often than she admits, she prays before they arrive. She has just stopped expecting.

Hey, sit on the beanbag. Do not put it away yet. Because there is a moment in John where Jesus tells a group of people to do one specific thing with their eyes, and I want to tell you what happened five minutes before it.

Look at what was walking up the road while He said it

He is at a well in Samaria. He has just had the long conversation with the woman who came at the wrong hour, and she has run off into the town to tell everybody, and the disciples have come back with lunch and are trying to get Him to eat.

And He says this.

Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest.John 4:35

Say not ye, there are yet four months. He is quoting the thing they say. The reasonable, agricultural, sensible thing: these things take time, it is not the season, nothing is ready.

And then: lift up your eyes.

Because here is what is happening while He is speaking. The woman has gone into Sychar and the men of the town are at that moment coming out along the road toward the well. The harvest He is telling them to look at is walking up the track in front of them, and they are looking at the sandwiches.

You are being told to lift your eyes rather than to wait four months, and the field He said that over had people walking across it at the time. That is not an inspirational reading of a famous line; John 4:35 sets it against the sentence about waiting, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a Samaritan road and stands it up in a youth room with a crisp packet under the radiator. Nothing had to be sent for. It was already in view.

Now the second half, and it is about the specific mistake the disciples made, because you are making the same one and it is an honest one.

They were not lazy and they were not faithless. They had gone to buy food. They were doing the practical thing that needed doing. Their eyes were exactly where a responsible person's eyes should be.

That is the whole trouble. Down is where the work is. Down is the beanbags and the crisp packet and the money out of your own account and whether anybody is bringing a bat.

Lifting your eyes is not a spiritual technique. It is literally just the opposite direction from where the work is, and the work never stops asking for your eyes.

You have been looking exactly where a faithful person looks, and He is asking you for one different direction rather than more effort. John 4:35 says lift up your eyes and look, which is an instruction about direction and not about intensity, and it is the Holy Spirit who turns a head that has been down for a long time.

What ripe actually looks like at twenty three teenagers

Let me be careful, because I am not about to tell you that revival is breaking out in your youth room and I do not know that.

But I will tell you what white to harvest looked like in that chapter. It looked like a group of ordinary townspeople walking up a road because one woman they did not entirely respect had said something to them.

That is it. No signs. No atmosphere. People walking, because of a sentence somebody said.

So when you ask what ripeness looks like in your room, do not look for the thing you have seen on a stage somewhere. Look for people walking up a road. Twenty three of them came tonight. Somebody sat next to the new one without being asked. Somebody who never speaks asked you a question at the end and you gave a short answer and they nodded.

You are standing in a room where people keep walking up the road, and He counted exactly that as a harvest in view. John 4:30 says they went out of the city and came unto Him, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that the measure of a thing rather than the atmosphere in a room.

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

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 anybody sows. Not the amount of visible fruit in your room this term. 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.