Not by Might, and She Has Tried Might

The marker gives out halfway through the word Tuesday. She shakes it, tries again, gets gray, and puts it down.

The office at the back of the community center is really a supply closet with a window in it. Two filing cabinets, a kettle on top of the shorter one, a radiator that knocks twice and then settles. And the whiteboard, which is the whole of one wall, and which has two years on it.

Left to right, the way she planned it in the first week: the pilot in blue, the funding application in red, the volunteer schedule, the second site, the kitchen. Arrows. Dates crossed out and written again in different pens, so that some boxes hold three dates and you can tell by the color which year each one was written in. And in the top corner, in her own handwriting from a Thursday twenty-two months ago, four words she wrote before there was anything to plan: somebody has to start.

It is eight forty at night. Everybody went home at seven. Down the corridor the hall smells of soup and floor polish and the chairs are stacked eight high, and she stacked them, because two of the volunteers have exams and one has a father in the hospital and it is quicker to stack them than to ask.

The project works. That is the part nobody would believe if she said it out loud with the tiredness in her voice. Forty children on a Tuesday, twenty-six on a Thursday, a kitchen that feeds them and a room where somebody sits down beside them with their reading. It works. It works because for two years she has been the thing that makes it work, and she knows precisely, to the hour, what that has cost, and she has never once let anybody see the sum.

Tonight there is a form on the desk, due Friday. It is not a hard form. It is nine questions and she has answered harder ones with a child on her hip. She has been looking at question one for eleven minutes.

Because underneath the form, quiet as the radiator, is a thought that is not about the form at all. If I stop pushing, it stops. Not it would be difficult. Not it would take a while to recover. It stops. That is what she believes, and she believes it because for two years it has been true.

She looks up at the whiteboard, at somebody has to start, and notices that at some point the word somebody quietly became the word only.

You know that whiteboard. Yours might be a spreadsheet, or a calendar on the refrigerator, or nothing written down at all, just a running total in your head of everything that would fall over if you stopped. And you know the eleven minutes in front of question one. I want to tell you where the force has actually been coming from.

Not by Might Is Not a Poster

Let me say the awkward thing first, because you are safe here. You have probably had this verse said at you. It is on mugs. It gets read out at the start of meetings by people who then ask you to take on one more thing. A sentence used as a slogan loses the power to say anything, so let me put it back where it was first said, and where it was first said is a building site with nothing standing on it.

Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord of hosts.Zechariah 4:6

Zerubbabel had a foundation and no temple. The work had stopped, the opposition was better connected than he was, and the old men who could remember the first house had wept at the size of the new one. Into that, the prophet is shown a lampstand of gold with a bowl on the top and seven lamps, and an olive tree on either side of it, and pipes running oil from the trees into the bowl.

Look at what is missing from that picture. There is nobody carrying oil. In the tabernacle and in every ordinary lampstand of Israel's worship, a priest walks over with a jar, morning and evening, forever. In this one the oil arrives by itself, from the trees, through the pipes, into the bowl, out to the lamps. The light is real light and it burns all night, and the burning is not the priest's achievement.

That is the picture the famous sentence comes out of. It is not a scolding for having worked hard. It is a description of where the oil comes from.

You are the lamp in that vision, and you were never the one carrying the jar. That is not a soft reading of Zechariah 4:6; it is what the written word puts into the picture and what it deliberately leaves out, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a vision that old and makes it a fact in a supply closet at eight forty at night. The light on a Tuesday is real. The oil was never yours to produce.

Notice also what the verse does not do. It does not say the work was a mistake. It does not say your two years were the flesh and you should be ashamed of them now. Zerubbabel's hands laid that foundation, and the same chapter says plainly that his hands would finish it (Zechariah 4:9). The hands stayed in the story. What changed was the answer to one question, and the question was: what is this running on?

You have been carrying a weight that Someone else was already carrying, and you are not in trouble for it. Scripture says his hands would complete the house and that it would be by the Spirit, both in the same chapter, and it is the Holy Spirit who holds those two together in a person without turning either one into a rebuke. Nobody is taking the work off you tonight. Something is being taken out from underneath it.

The Mountain Was Never Yours to Flatten

Read the next line, because it is the one that gets left off the mug.

Who are you, O great mountain? Before Zerubbabel you shall become a plain (Zechariah 4:7). The mountain is addressed. Somebody speaks to it. And what levels it is not a better plan and not a heroic push; it is a word spoken over it by an ordinary man with the Spirit of God behind him. What is being described is not effort removed. It is effort no longer bearing the load.

Now let me be careful, because this is exactly where this kind of teaching goes wrong. I am not going to tell you that your emptiness is a gift. It is not a gift and I will not dress it up as one, and I am not going to suggest you need more of it. What is true is smaller and much better than that: the emptiness is not a disqualification, and it was never the fuel in the first place. You did not run those two years on being full. You ran them on something you did not have, which is precisely why they cost what they cost.

You are supplied tonight, and the supply has nothing to do with what is left in you at eight forty. It is written that it is not by might, nor by power, but by His Spirit, and it is that same Spirit, rather than the last of your own force, who is in the room where the radiator knocks. Question one does not need the version of you who started this two years ago. It needs oil, and the oil is already in the bowl.

And I am going to be careful about how much I hand you, because this is the other place these things go wrong. I am not talking about the second site, or the funding cycle, or what any of this looks like in a year. I would be making that up and you would know. I am talking about tonight: nine questions, the walk to the car, the lights off behind you. One evening's worth.

You have tonight, and tonight is genuinely covered. His word says it is the Lord of hosts who supplies this house, and the Holy Spirit is the One who lands a promise from a building site in Jerusalem inside a closet with a kettle on the filing cabinet. What happens in March belongs to Him and I will not put a date on Him.