A report crossed my desk this week that nearly six hundred churches across the United Kingdom have signed on to work together ahead of an evangelistic tour there. Six hundred. Different denominations, different buildings, different sizes — some with a worship team and a sound engineer, some with a piano and a faithful woman who still plays it every Sunday. All of them preparing for one sentence to be spoken over their towns: God loves you.
What struck me was not the tour. It was the number, and what the number is made of. Six hundred congregations means thousands of quiet, unglamorous jobs. Somebody is learning how to pray with a stranger who comes forward shaking. Somebody is booking a bus. Somebody is writing down the name of a neighbor she has been carrying for eleven years and finally has a reason to ask. None of them can reach a nation. Each of them can reach the street they live on.
Nehemiah kept a list of the small jobs
There is a chapter in the Bible that most of us skim, and I think we skim it because it looks like a phone book. Nehemiah 3 is a register of who repaired which section of Jerusalem's broken wall. Goldsmiths. Perfumers. The daughters of Shallum. Priests who had probably never held a trowel. And over and over the text says a family repaired the stretch opposite their own house.
Nobody was handed the whole wall. Everybody was handed the piece in front of them. And then comes the line that has stayed with me: "So built we the wall; and all the wall was joined together unto the half thereof: for the people had a heart to work" (Nehemiah 4:6).
Joined together. That is the miracle hiding in the phone book. A hundred separate patches of masonry, each one worked by people who could see only their own corner, and God made it one wall. Not one of those families could have pointed to the finished thing and said, I did that. All of them could have said, I was there, and I had a heart to work.
The Spirit tends to assign you what is already near you
I notice something when I sit with people who feel useless to God. Almost always, the assignment they are waiting for is enormous and far away, and the assignment the Holy Spirit has actually put in their hands is small and close. The coworker who mentioned her mother is ill. The nephew who stopped going to church and nobody has called. The man two doors down who waves but has never been asked a real question.
That is not a consolation prize. That is how the wall gets built. And I want to say plainly that the Spirit still moves in those ordinary conversations right now — not only in the book of Acts, not only under stadium lights. I have watched God answer prayers prayed over a kitchen table in Ravenna. I have watched someone come to faith because a friend from Muskegon would not stop being kind to them. The power is not in the platform. It never was.
The message is small enough to carry
Here is the mercy in that tour's title: God loves you. You do not need a degree to say it. You do not need to win an argument. You need to mean it, and you need to have been near enough to someone that they will believe you when you do.
Which is why mobilizing for the gospel almost never looks impressive from the outside. It looks like a handful of people in a room with their Bibles open on a Wednesday night. That is exactly what we are doing tonight at 6:30 at Bible Study, and next Tuesday at 11 when we gather to pray. Nobody will film it. But that is where hearts get a taste for the work, and where you learn the Word well enough to have it ready when a hurting friend asks you something at 10 p.m.
If your patch feels like nothing
Maybe you have been working your section a long time and it still looks like a pile of rubble. You have prayed for that person, that marriage, that healing, and the answer has not come. Hear this gently: your faithfulness is not measured by the result you can see. Nehemiah's wall took fifty-two days; God has been patient with the world far longer than that, and He has not lost track of a single stone you have laid.
Christ is the one building. "Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it" (Psalm 127:1). He carried the whole wall Himself on a cross so that we could be trusted with a piece of it. So pick up the stone in front of you. Say the sentence. He joins the work together.
Join us this Sunday at 10:30am — Outpouring Worship Center, Ravenna.