The Word Only Means Sent

Ari flinches at the word, and he has never worked out whether the flinch is discernment or snobbery.

He is fairly sure it is not the word's fault. He knows what it means. He has the languages, more or less, and he could tell you in one sentence that it is an ordinary term for somebody dispatched with a message, that it was used of official envoys and of ships' captains and of people carrying letters, and that there is nothing lofty in it whatsoever.

He knows all that, and he still flinches, because the word does not arrive in a room carrying its dictionary. It arrives carrying everything it has picked up on the way.

And here is what makes his position awkward rather than comfortable.

He does the thing. Whatever the word actually describes, stripped of its accumulation, Ari has been doing it for about fourteen years. He has started things and handed them on. He goes where he is not established and finds it easier than staying where he is. He is the person who ends up in the difficult new situation with nobody to hand it to, and he has never once used any word for that, because every available word makes him wince.

So he has a function with no name he is willing to say, and that turns out to be more expensive than he expected.

Because a thing you cannot name is a thing you cannot examine. He cannot ask whether he is doing it well, or badly, or too much, or at cost to people, because asking would require saying what it is.

You have your own version of this. There is a word that makes you flinch, and there may be a function underneath it that you are living out anyway, and you have paid for the flinch in a currency you have not noticed.

Nobody here is going to hand you a title. That is not what this is and it is the opposite of what this is.

But it is worth getting the word back to what it says, because it says almost nothing, and the almost nothing is the gift.

The verse uses it in the flattest possible way

There is a sentence in John where the word appears in its plainest form, and what it is doing there is the whole answer.

Verily, verily, I say unto you, The servant is not greater than his lord; neither he that is sent greater than he that sent him.John 13:16

He has just washed their feet. That is the setting, and it matters, because the sentence is spoken by a man kneeling on a floor with a towel.

And the word rendered he that is sent is the ordinary one. It is not a rank. It sits in that sentence beside servant, in a parallel construction, and the entire purpose of the sentence is to say that neither of them outranks anybody.

That is a remarkable place for the word to appear. Its plainest New Testament use is inside a sentence explicitly forbidding it from being used as a status.

And you are not being offered a rank. That is not my caution: the written word puts he that is sent into a parallel with servant in a sentence about nobody being greater, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a man who has flinched at the word for fourteen years.

And the flinch was not wrong. The word says let nothing be done through strife or vainglory, and the Spirit is the one who has been keeping that alive in you, which is very probably where the flinch came from, and it has been doing its job rather than being a failure of yours.

What the word actually costs you to refuse

Now the other half, and it is the half Ari needed.

There is a real cost to having a function you will not name, and it is not the cost you would expect. It is not that you miss out on recognition. Ari does not want recognition and would find it unbearable.

The cost is that you cannot get help with it.

A thing without a name cannot be discussed with anybody. It cannot be prayed about specifically. It cannot be examined for whether it is being done well. You cannot ask an older person how they handled the part that is hard, because describing the part that is hard would mean describing the thing, and describing the thing would mean using a word you will not use.

So a person ends up fourteen years into a demanding function with no vocabulary for it, doing it alone, and calling that humility.

And you are permitted to name what you are doing. Not to claim anything: the word says that we should not think of ourselves more highly than we ought, but to think soberly, and soberly is the operative instruction there rather than lowly, and the Spirit is the one who makes accurate self-assessment possible where both flattery and false modesty fail.

And an accurate word is not a claim. The word says let your yea be yea, which is a command about plain speech, and the Spirit is the one who lets a person say a true thing about themselves in the same flat voice they would use about anybody else.

Nobody is asking you to use it in public

I want to be very plain here, because this site would rather say nothing than produce one more person with a word in front of their name.

Do not take a title. Do not ask to be called anything. Do not put it on anything, and do not correct anybody who does not use it. Ephesians 4 says the five were given to equip everybody else, which makes them a service and not an aristocracy, and a set of functions that turns into a ranking has read the chapter backwards.

And nothing here says a word about anybody who does use it. That is their business and their conscience and it is not the subject of this article, and if what rises in you reading this is a judgement about somebody else, that is not from Him and I am not going to feed it.

What is being handed over is much smaller and entirely private: a plain word, used in your own head, so that you can think about your own life clearly.

And you are not more than anybody in that room. The word says he that is sent is not greater than he that sent him, said by a man with a towel, and the Spirit is the one who keeps that true in somebody who has just been given permission to name a function.