The Name On The Flour Sack

For the believer who can say what she is in the kitchen and not on the form.

How long has it been since you said what you are without adding anything to it?

Not in prayer, where you're fluent. Not in the car by yourself, where you say a great deal. I mean out loud, to a person who was listening, with a full stop straight after it and no explanation attached.

She's in the church hall on a Tuesday with the big table pulled out, and there's a form in front of her for the county food scheme. Most of it's easy enough. Then there's a box near the top marked denomination, and it's twice the size of the line above it where she's already written the word Christian in her careful hand.

She keeps looking at the two lines. The smaller one holds the thing she'd die for. The larger one is waiting for a word she can't say at a school gate without watching somebody's face change.

On the shelf behind her there's a flour sack from her grandmother's pantry, washed soft and kept for sentiment, with faded letters still printed across it from whatever mill it came from.

The name that fits you was printed on you before anybody sized a box for the other one. The written Word records it being given in Antioch before any later name existed, and the Holy Spirit keeps it current in your mouth rather than leaving it as somebody else's history.

What the Larger Box Teaches You

The box isn't malicious, and the county isn't trying to sort her soul. Somebody needed a field for reporting, and the printer made it the size the layout allowed.

But she's learned something from it anyway, and she's been learning it for years in a hundred small ways. The word that costs her nothing gets one small line. The word that costs her a conversation gets twice the room. Over time you start to believe the sizing.

That's how a settled woman ends up saying "oh, we're just a little fellowship" in a tone of apology, when what's true is that she's given twenty two years to a room full of people she loves.

You've heard yourself do it. It isn't weakness and it isn't doubt. It's what happens when the world keeps handing you a bigger box for your side than for your Savior, and you fill both in without noticing which one you shrank.

A Word From the Street Outside

There's a city in the account called Antioch, a long way north of Jerusalem, a trading town full of people who weren't from there.

Believers scattered by trouble arrived and started speaking about Jesus to Greeks, which hadn't been planned and hadn't been agreed anywhere. A great many trusted Him. Barnabas came up to look, and the account says that when he saw it he was glad. He fetched Saul, brought him back, and they taught there for a full year together.

Here's the closing line of the verse:

And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch.Acts 11:26 (KJV)

Nobody printed that word on a form. It arrived from the street, from neighbors and traders who'd watched a group of ordinary workers for twelve months and needed something to call them.

You're named for whose you are before anybody measures a box for which sort you are. Scripture hands that name to disciples who never asked for it, and the Holy Spirit keeps the description alive in you today.

The Letters Don't Come Out in the Wash

Here's what I'd carry out of that hall if I could only take one thing.

Her grandmother's flour sack has been boiled, scrubbed, used for bread cloths and dried on a line through forty winters. The printing has faded until you have to hold it to the window. It has never once come off, because it wasn't stuck on the surface. It went into the weave at the mill, before the sack was ever filled with anything.

That's the difference between what's printed into you and what's added later. Later words can be argued with, outgrown, corrected at a school gate, or quietly dropped in conversation. The word that went in at the mill just keeps showing when you hold the cloth up to the light.

You carry a name that went into the weave, so no amount of handling has worn it off. The written Word gives it as a plain description of what believers already were, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping that description true in you.

I'm Not Asking You to Shrink Your Own Room

Let me be plain, because there's a version of this message that would hurt you and I refuse to write it.

The little fellowship isn't a lesser thing, and the name over its door isn't a corruption of anything. Somebody there loved Christ at real cost before you arrived, and part of the reason you know His name is that they did. I'm not asking you to hold them lightly or to speak about them with less warmth.

This isn't a replacement for that name. It's the cloth under it. If this word became one more label to size a box for, it would have turned into the very thing it describes the absence of, and I'd rather leave it unsaid.

You can fill in both boxes honestly, because keeping both costs you neither. Scripture sets the Antioch name underneath every later name without canceling one of them, and the Holy Spirit keeps it load bearing instead of competitive.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.