Three o’clock in the afternoon, and two men are walking up to the temple to pray. They are not important men. One of them has recently denied he ever knew Jesus, out loud, three times, to a servant girl.
At the gate called Beautiful there is a man who has never walked. He is carried there daily and set down where the crowd passes, because the crowd is where the money is. He has done this for forty years. He sees Peter and John and asks them for what he always asks for.
Peter looks straight at him. So does John. Look on us, Peter says, and the man looks up expecting to receive something.
Then comes the sentence.
Silver and gold have I none. But such as I have give I thee (Acts 3:6).
Peter has nothing the man asked for. Nothing at all. He is poorer than the beggar’s hope. And he is not embarrassed, because he knows something about his own pockets that the man does not know about his.
The inventory problem
Most Christians would recognise the first half of Peter’s sentence immediately. Silver and gold have I none. We know what we lack. We have a detailed and well-rehearsed account of it.
It is the second half we cannot say.
Ask a believer what he has to give, and watch what happens. He will point somewhere else. To the pastor, who has training. To the one who is gifted. To the person who seems to have something happening. Then he will say some version of the same thing: I am not really in a position to give anybody anything.
That is not humility. It is an accounting error.
It comes from being taught, for a very long time, how to get to God. Religion is full of instruction on approach. Draw nearer. Try harder. Do better. Get more. And a person who has spent years being told how to get will eventually conclude that he has not yet got, and that he has nothing to hand over.
Meanwhile Christ has joined Himself to us.
Everything you have comes from Him
That is the thing the religion of getting cannot account for. The union has already happened. He took our humanity and did not let it go. He carried us into His Father’s arms, and we are received in Him (Ephesians 1:6). We are not approaching. We are held.
Which means the question is not whether you have anything. The question is what you have.
You have Christ, and the Spirit of Christ, and a life that is joined to His. You have been seen, received, forgiven, and kept. You have whatever you have learned in the years He has been working on you, including the parts you would rather He had done more quietly.
Peter’s pockets were empty of everything the beggar named and full of the only thing that would have been any use.
Waiting for what is already here
Much of our praying assumes the thing we need is somewhere else, and has not come yet, and might come if we ask long enough and loud enough. We sing about it. We book the hall and ask God to send what we are already carrying.
There is a quieter and more serious possibility. The life we are waiting for has already been given, and it is waiting on us.
That is not a boast. It is not a claim that we are impressive, and it is not a reason to stop praying. It is a claim about Him, and about what He has done to us by joining Himself to us. The people of God are not an audience hoping for a visitation. They are what the Spirit has already moved into.
How it comes out
It comes out as we love the people in front of us. Not before.
A man starts paying attention to his own street and finds that he can settle an argument between two neighbours, and that he is apparently the only person willing to try. A woman who thought she had nothing discovers she can sit with a frightened person for two hours without needing to fix anything, and that this is rarer than she knew. Somebody prays for a sick colleague in a car park and is more surprised than the colleague.
Gifts do not usually announce themselves in advance. They surface in use. The Spirit brings them to light and puts them to work, and the owner is normally the last to find out.
And then the reach of it begins to show.
A marriage. A child. A family. A neighbourhood. A nation.
That list is the whole scale, and it starts inside somebody’s house. The nations are not a separate calling for people with a different temperament and a plane ticket. The nations begin at our door, and in this part of the world they are in the lift, on the worksite, and two floors up. A nation is what you get when enough households stop being afraid of each other.
The world is reshaped by people who are glad in Christ
Not by strain. Not by people trying to be significant, which is exhausting to watch and exhausting to do.
Gladness is what makes this sustainable, and gladness is a response to something that actually happened. It cannot be manufactured and it does not need to be. It comes from knowing what you are holding.
So the beggar at the gate is looking up with his hand out, and he is about to get something far better than what he asked for, from a man who had nothing he wanted.
What we have, we give.
Look again at your own pockets. You have been checking the wrong one.
Earlier in this series: what God is like, and how His love lands on the people nearest you.