They Call It My Project

They call it your project, and last week you heard yourself call it that too.

Your brother started it, years ago, and it is not malicious. Your project. How is the project going. It is the word people use about a thing a man does at weekends that has an end point, like a boat in a garage.

And it has been said so often at this table that you have absorbed it, and on Tuesday you said to a customer, I will get that sorted over the weekend, I am just finishing a few bits on the project.

To a customer. A man who pays you.

I am not going to set you against your family, and I am not going to tell you to correct them. I am going to talk about what a man said about himself in Judges, and about what God said back.

My family is poor, and I am the least

There is an exchange in Judges where a man is given an assignment and answers with a description of himself, and the description is all about size.

Gideon has just been told what he is going to do, and here is the first thing out of his mouth.

And he said unto him, O my Lord, wherewith shall I save Israel? behold, my family is poor in Manasseh, and I am the least in my father's house. (Judges 6:15, King James Version)

You are not disqualified by the size of your own description, and you never were. Judges 6:15 has a man answer a commission with an inventory of his own smallness and the commission stands regardless, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that to a corner desk with invoices on it.

Notice where he got that description. My family is poor. I am the least in my father's house. Those are not his conclusions, they are his family's categories, repeated back by a man who has heard them all his life.

And God does not argue with the inventory. He does not tell Gideon he is actually quite impressive. He says go in this thy might, and leaves the sentence where it was.

You have an assignment that a borrowed word has never once been able to reduce. The Spirit of God is the one who makes an exchange at a winepress reach a man sitting at a desk in his own dining room, and Judges 6:15 has the smallness spoken out loud and the work given anyway.

A borrowed word

Let me say what happened on Tuesday, because it is the actual subject of this article.

You did not decide that this is a project. You picked up a word that was lying around in your own family, the way anybody picks up a word, and you used it without inspecting it, and it came out of your mouth in front of a customer.

You were never convinced by that word, and borrowing one has never once been the same as agreeing with it. The Holy Spirit is the one who shows a man which of his words came from somewhere else, and the written word has a man repeat his family's description of himself in Judges 6:15.

And a word does things. Project has an end in it. Project means the thing finishes and then you go back to normal. Every time you use it you tell whoever is listening, including yourself, that this is an interval.

It is not an interval. It has been four years and it pays for the car and the holiday and about a third of this house.

You have something with no end date in it, and a borrowed word has never once described it. His Spirit is the one who lets a man hear which word he has been using, and Judges 6:15 shows a borrowed self description spoken in God's hearing and the commission unchanged.

The accurate word, once

So here is the exercise, and it is one word.

Use the accurate one, out loud, once. Business. Work. My job. Whichever is true. In a sentence to somebody, today.

You are able to use an accurate word, and using it has never once been a correction of anybody. Judges 6:15 has God answer a small self description by sending the man anyway, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes one true word possible for a man who borrowed a smaller one.

And do not correct your family. Not at the table, not in a text. The word in your own mouth is the thing we are dealing with and theirs is not your business today.

Then go and do the work. Because a man using one accurate word and then not working has simply changed his vocabulary, and nothing in your week is different.

You were never required to get their language changed first, and you are not required to now. The Spirit of God carries an accurate word past a habit picked up at a family table, and the written word lets a man's own small description stand and sends him out in Judges 6:15.