Even In Caesar's Household

Every family has one and in his family it is his brother-in-law.

Not a bad man. That is what makes it complicated. He is generous, he turns up when somebody is ill, he drove four hours in one night when the baby was in hospital and he has never once mentioned it since.

And he thinks the whole thing is nonsense. Kindly, and without any heat, and he has thought so for as long as anybody has known him.

There was a period where he would argue about it at the table and that was almost better, because at least there was something happening. Now he just smiles and passes the dish and says nothing at all, and the smile is the most closed thing in that house.

Here is the part nobody knows.

About four years ago this man stopped putting his brother-in-law's name in his prayers.

He did not decide it. He noticed it. He was going through the family one evening the way he does, and he got to the end and realized he had gone straight past him, and that he had been going straight past him for some time.

And what he felt was not guilt. It was relief, and that is what has bothered him ever since.

He had stopped because saying the name had started to feel like pretending.

The last address anybody would have predicted

Let me name what happened, because it is not what you think it is.

You did not lose faith in God. You lost faith in a prediction. Somewhere in the years of that closed smile you did the arithmetic on one man and you came out with a number, and once you have a number you stop praying, because nobody prays about arithmetic.

That is what the relief was. It was the relief of not holding a hope you had privately concluded was silly.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as encouragement: the verdict you passed is not a verdict anybody is qualified to pass, and the closing line of one of those letters names the exact address that proves it. That is not my kind reading of four years, it is what stands written at the end of the fourth chapter of Philippians, and the same Holy Spirit who carried that greeting is the one who has kept you uneasy about the relief.

Read it. It is a throwaway line in a list of greetings and it is one of the most extraordinary sentences in the collection.

All God's people here send you greetings, especially those who belong to Caesar's household.Philippians 4:22

Especially those who belong to Caesar's household.

The letter is being written from custody. And the greeting comes from inside the emperor's own establishment.

Nobody would have predicted that address. If you had asked anybody in that decade to list the places this would reach, that household would not have been on the list, and it would not have been near the list, and the man in custody writing the letter does not present it as a triumph. He mentions it in passing, at the end, the way you mention who else says hello.

So this is yours right now rather than after some change in him: your prediction was never data, because the written word puts believers inside the household of the man holding the author in chains, and the Spirit of God has never once been governed by anybody's estimate of who is likely.

And the guard, because there is a way to hear this that would do harm.

Nothing here promises you your brother-in-law. I am not going to tell you that. No verse hands you another man's heart on a schedule, and anybody who says otherwise is selling something, and if I told you four more years would do it I would be inventing.

What is written is simply that the reach of this has never matched anybody's forecast, and the Holy Spirit works in the households nobody had written down.