He Is Not More Pleased With You Working

The good tablecloth comes out twice a year and it was out that night, iron marks still showing in the folds.

Pot roast. The candle from the drawer, the one that only ever gets an inch shorter. Nine people around a table that seats eight comfortably, and a chair pulled out at the end with nobody in it, because Arlen was at the counter with a plate in his hand and his coat on.

It was his daughter's birthday. Twenty-three. She had asked for one thing: dinner at the house.

He had carved. He is good at it, and he had stood at the end of the table and said grace with his keys in his other hand and everybody's eyes shut. Then he had taken his plate to the counter and eaten it standing up in about four minutes, the way he has eaten for thirty years, because a machine was sitting on a low-loader out at the yard and it had to be back by seven and somebody had to move it.

Nobody made a scene. This is an old thing in that house.

But his daughter came out to the counter with a bowl of green beans nobody had touched, and she said it easily, without any edge on it at all.

Dad. You can sit down. That is the whole present.

And here is what would surprise anybody who knows him: he tried. He genuinely tried. He got as far as putting his hand on the back of that empty chair, and he could not do it, and he made a joke and went out to the truck.

He thought about it the whole way to the yard, eleven minutes, and by the time he got there he had it, and it was worse than he expected.

Sitting down feels like getting away with something.

That is what it comes to. Somewhere down under everything he actually believes about God, under the doctrine he could recite and the twenty-two years he has run the sound desk, is a quiet conviction that God's face is warmest toward him when he is out working, and that a man at a table with a napkin on his knee has stepped out from under something.

But if you woke him at three in the morning and asked when God is most pleased with him, that is the answer that would come out, and it has been running his calendar for three decades.

If any of that is familiar, come and sit down with me a minute, in the chair, all the way down. I want to show you what God actually put in the year.

He put feasts in the year Himself

Here is a thing a working man finds genuinely difficult to take in.

When God laid out the year for His people, He did not fill it with extra work. He filled it with appointments, and He put His own name on them, and what happens at nearly every one of them is that everybody stops working, cooks a great deal of food, and enjoys themselves in public for several days.

Concerning the feasts of the LORD, which ye shall proclaim to be holy convocations, even these are my feasts.Leviticus 23:2

These are my feasts. Not a concession He made to a people who kept asking for a break. His idea, His diary, His name on the page. Now let me say the other thing at the front, so it is not hanging over the rest: I am not going to tell you which of those days belong on your calendar today. Believers who love God with everything they have land in different places on that, and it is not the business of this page, and nobody reading this is outside for keeping none of them. What I want you to see is what the appointments say about His character.

And what they say is that He built gladness into the structure of time, on purpose, and called it holy. You are wanted at a table and not only on a site, because Leviticus 23:2 has God calling those feast days His own, and the Holy Spirit is not the author of that low pull that tells a man to eat standing up.

Then look at how the instruction about them actually reads.

Because the LORD thy God shall bless thee in all thine increase, and in all the works of thine hands, therefore thou shalt surely rejoice.Deuteronomy 16:15

Therefore thou shalt surely rejoice. Read what sits in front of the therefore. The gladness is not something the people work up to earn the blessing. The blessing comes first and the gladness is the sensible response to it, and God is the one who says so out loud. Nobody in that sentence is getting away with anything.

And when the people heard the word read out and stood there weeping over how far behind they were, listen to what they were told.

Go your way, eat the fat, and drink the sweet, and send portions unto them for whom nothing is prepared: for this day is holy unto our Lord: neither be ye sorry; for the joy of the LORD is your strength.Nehemiah 8:10

Neither be ye sorry. On a holy day, to people who felt they had failed, the instruction was go home and eat something good. And notice the word strength in that sentence, sitting in a place a working man would never have put it. Not your output, not your hours. His joy, and it is called your strength. That is already yours and not something being held back from you, because Nehemiah 8:10 says the joy of the Lord is the strength itself, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes gladness a source rather than a luxury.

Now here is where all of it is pointing, and this is the part I most want you to have.

And in this mountain shall the LORD of hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wines on the lees well refined.Isaiah 25:6

Read what that is. A mountain, all people, and a meal, and the man laying it on is God. That is the end of the story. Not a final inspection, not a shift, not a tally read out. A table with the good things on it, and the same picture turns up again at the very end of the book.

Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb.Revelation 19:9

A supper. That is what everything has been walking toward the whole time.

Which means every appointed time God ever put in a year was a rehearsal for that, and a rehearsal has one purpose: to get a people used to something that is coming. Sitting down was never time off from the real thing. Sitting down is practice for the real thing. You have been called to a supper, and Revelation 19:9 puts the word blessed on the people who are invited to it, and His Spirit is already putting the appetite for it in you, which is what that ache at the end of the tablecloth actually was.