For the receptionist writing the same forty names again, in blue, before anybody arrives.
When Jesus healed the ten men with leprosy, they were sent off and cleansed as they went, and one of them turned back. What the account records about him is specific. He came back praising God with a loud voice, fell at His feet, and gave thanks, and he was a Samaritan.
The question Jesus asks afterward is the one that stays with people. Were there not ten cleansed, and where are the nine? That isn't bitterness. It's a plain observation that nine out of ten received something real and didn't come back, which is roughly the ratio for most good work done for most people.
Now look at your desk. Forty blank tags, two blue markers, a list in a plastic wallet, and about thirty-five minutes before the doors open.
Work for people who will not come back is still work, and the ratio has always been about the same. Scripture says whatsoever ye do, do it heartily as to the Lord, for ye serve the Lord Christ, while the Holy Spirit is at a reception desk before opening.
What You Actually Do With Those Forty Minutes
Be exact about it, because it gets filed as admin and it is not admin.
You write them by hand, which takes four times as long as printing them and which you have defended twice to people who suggested a machine. You do it because a printed tag makes a person a record and a handwritten one makes them expected.
You also get the spellings right. All forty of them. That includes the two that everybody else gets wrong, the one that changed last year when she married, plus the man who goes by his second name and has never once had to say so in this building.
Nobody taught you that. You worked it out because you'd been on the other side of it, standing in a foyer somewhere holding a tag with somebody else's version of your name on it, and you remember exactly how small that felt.
You are not labeling attendees, you are telling forty people they were expected. The written Word calls ordinary labor service to the Lord Christ, while the Holy Spirit is in a correctly spelled name on a Tuesday.
Where the Nine Went
Here's the hard part of this job, and it is not that nobody notices. Several people do. The hard part is the proportion.
About one in ten will ever mention the tags. That woman last autumn who said nobody had spelled her name right in eleven years, and the man who took his home. Those are real and you remember them, which tells you how few there have been.
The other thirty-six pick the tag up, put it on, and think nothing at all, which is exactly what a good tag is supposed to produce. Then they hand it back at the end or leave it on a chair.
That ratio is not a failure of your work. It is what Jesus observed out loud about ten men He had just healed of something considerably larger than a misspelled name.
You are working at one in ten, and that was the ratio for Him as well. Scripture puts the labor under the Lord rather than under a response rate, while the Holy Spirit is in the thirty-six as much as in the four.
That's worth holding onto the next time a room empties and the tags are left on the chairs. The nine who didn't come back had still been cleansed. Nothing about their walking away undid what had been done for them, and nothing about a tag left behind undoes what it did at half past eight when somebody picked it up and found their own name spelled right.
What Will Not Be Promised About That Desk
There's a version of this teaching that goes wrong, and it is worth refusing before it arrives.
That version says that if you do it faithfully, God will notice and something will follow. A promotion. A different role. Somebody senior finally saying what your work does for that building.
The verse holds none of it. Forty tags a week put God under no obligation. Nothing is accruing, no balance exists anywhere, and the desk is not a lever.
What it offers in its place is a tense. Ye serve the Lord Christ. Not one day this will count for something. It counts at half eight, in blue marker, whether or not anything about your job ever changes.
Forty tags a week is around two thousand a year, and every one of them is the first thing a nervous person reads about themselves in that building.
That is not a small office job dressed up. It is the actual function of the desk, performed forty times a week by somebody who has never once described it that way out loud, including to herself.
You are serving in the present tense, and nothing is being banked for later. The written Word says ye serve the Lord Christ rather than promising a way up, while the Holy Spirit is in the work rather than in a reward attached to it.
The Serving Is Present Tense
There's a sentence in Colossians written to people whose work was unchosen and largely unthanked, and it does something the world it was written into would have found absurd.
> And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men; Knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the inheritance: for ye serve the Lord Christ. > Colossians 3:23-24 (KJV)
Ye serve the Lord Christ. Present tense, flat statement, about the least regarded work in that society. Not you are serving Him in some inner sense while the real work happens elsewhere. The thing in your hands is the serving.
Then the reward, and the word chosen is careful. An inheritance. Not a wage, which would rise and fall with performance and could be withheld after a bad week. An inheritance comes because of who you belong to, which is exactly why the verse can name a reward without turning forty tags into a lever.
You serve the Lord Christ at half eight with a blue marker, and an inheritance was never wages. The written Word puts the serving in the present tense, while the Holy Spirit makes that true without promising you one thing about the job.
Wages and an inheritance both arrive, and only one of them can be short. Wages are measured against what was done and can be disputed line by line. An inheritance comes because of who somebody is to the one leaving it, which is why the verse can be so calm about a job that has never once thanked you.
Forty names a week, written in advance for people who do not yet know they will be nervous, is not a job that can be short.
Declare this over yourself
You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so what follows is not a claim made out of your own authority. It is agreement, said back to God in His own words, while the Holy Spirit carries it. How He orders the rest of it is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own time.
Speak these as a woman already received, out of a welcome she did not have to arrange. Who reads those names, and what the morning turns into, stays with God.
My hands are His, and this desk is His, and forty minutes before the doors open is not filler. The written Word of God says I serve the Lord Christ, in the present tense, about ordinary labor done in blue marker. I put down the expectation I had quietly attached to doing it well. The Holy Spirit is at this desk at half past eight, out ahead of me. This morning's tags are not separate from Him. Nothing is owed to me on their account, and I am working nothing. My palms are up, and every name written is God's.
Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.
This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.
Colossians 3:23-24
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
