Make Your Face Shine on Your Servant

He has done the eleven o'clock lift for nineteen years.

Chairs out, chairs back, urn on, urn off, somebody's mother collected on the way and dropped home after. He has done funerals nobody else wanted to help with, and a great many Saturdays with a strimmer round the back of a building nobody photographs.

He is not a martyr about it. If you thanked him he would be genuinely puzzled and slightly annoyed.

But there is a thing he believes, and he has never said it out loud in nineteen years, and it came out of him at about half past nine one evening in a yard, talking to a younger man who had asked him a straight question.

The younger man asked whether he felt close to God.

And he said, after a while: I think He is busy with the ones who need Him.

Meaning the ones in crisis. The new ones, the loud ones, the ones at the front on a Sunday night with something breaking open. He genuinely believes God's attention is a finite resource being properly allocated to the people whose need is greatest, and he has quietly, sensibly, and for nineteen years, taken himself off the list.

And so a man who has served longer than almost anybody in that building has never once asked God to look at him.

A servant asks outright, and nobody stops him

Make thy face to shine upon thy servant; and teach me thy statutes (Psalm 119:135).

Two things in that verse are worth a moment.

First, the word servant. That is how the man in the psalm describes himself, and it is the word you would use about yourself if anybody asked. He is not claiming to be special. He is the one doing the work.

Second, look at what a servant asks for. Not more strength. Not more work. Not a better rota. He asks for the face. Make Your face shine upon Your servant, which is the boldest possible request coming from the least self-important possible position, and there is not a word of correction anywhere near it.

A servant is allowed to ask to be looked at.

You are permitted to ask for the face, and being a worker has never once disqualified you. The word puts that request in the mouth of a servant and lets it stand, and it is the Holy Spirit who gives a quiet man the boldness to ask for something for himself, because Scripture calls Him the Spirit of adoption and adoption puts a worker in the family.

God's attention is not a rota

Now let me take apart the belief, because it is doing quiet damage and it is not true.

You have imagined attention as a finite thing. There is a quantity of it, and it goes where it is most needed, and a man who is fine and steady should not be drawing on it while somebody is in a crisis. That is a decent, generous instinct and it is exactly how a good foreman thinks about a crew.

It is not how God works, because God is not short of anything.

The parable of the lost sheep is not a parable about a shepherd who neglects ninety-nine. It is about a shepherd who has the capacity to go after one without any of the others being uncovered for a second. If going after the lost one meant the steady ones went unwatched, the story would be about a badly run farm rather than about the heart of God.

You have not been de-prioritized, because nothing about God is rationed. Scripture says He gives to all liberally and does not scold anybody for asking (James 1:5), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that real to a man who has spent nineteen years standing back so somebody else could be seen to first.

Nineteen years is not invisible

Let me say the plain thing.

The chairs. The urn. The strimmer round the back. The funerals nobody wanted. The lifts. Not one of those went unnoticed, and Scripture is unusually specific about this: God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love (Hebrews 6:10).

Read the verb in that. Forget. It is written to people who quietly wondered whether anybody had noticed, which means somebody in the first century felt exactly what you felt in that yard at half past nine.

You have been watched the whole time by somebody who is not keeping a rota. The written word says He does not forget the work and the labor of love, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land on a man who would be embarrassed to be thanked.

And I will not sell you anything, because you would walk off. Asking for the face does not mean a feeling arrives tonight and it does not change what needs doing on Saturday. What is settled is that a servant is allowed to ask, and that a man who asks has stopped believing he is at the back of a queue that does not exist.