Four Seconds On The Scaffold

Twenty to four on a Friday, second lift, the front of a terraced house that has been under scaffold for eleven days and is due off on Monday.

He is up there with a scraper and a dust mask around his neck, finishing the last strip of old render above the bay window, thinking about nothing at all except whether the shop on the corner still has the good bread at this time.

Somewhere below him, on another job, on another part of the same run, a man who should not have done it takes out a tie.

The whole lift moves.

Not a collapse. Scaffold does not do the thing it does in films. It goes about two inches sideways and it makes a noise like a bell being hit with a sock, and every board on it jumps at once, and his bucket goes over the edge and takes four hundred years to land.

Four seconds. Maybe five.

His boots slide, his left hand gets the standard and his right hand gets nothing, and his whole body has already understood something his head has not caught up with.

And in those four seconds two things come out of his mouth.

Not a prayer. Not a sentence with a structure. Two things, the first one just the Name, said the way you would say it if the Name were a hand you were reaching for, and the second one four words long, said twice, out loud, into a street where a woman with a pushchair is looking up at him with her mouth open.

Then it stops moving. It just stops. The tie goes back in and a man three houses down shouts something that is not repeatable and the world carries on.

He comes down the ladder like an old man. He sits on a bag of sand by the gate for a long time. Somebody puts a tea beside him and he cannot pick it up for a while, and when he does the surface of it is going in circles.

Here is the part that keeps him awake, and it is not the fall he did not have.

It is that for about four years he has not been able to tell anybody what he believes without half an hour of context. He qualifies. He explains what he does not mean before he says what he means. He has a whole apparatus for it now and he is tired of the sound of his own voice building it.

And at twenty to four on a Friday, with no time at all, his mouth published two items. Neither of them had a footnote. Neither of them was hedged. He did not choose them.

He has been walking around ever since with a question that will not leave him alone: is that it, then? Is that all that is left?

That was not a collapse. That was a load test.

Everything depends on which of those two words you use about what happened in your mouth that afternoon, so let us be careful with them.

A collapse is when the structure fails. A load test is when you find out what it carries.

Nobody builds a scaffold and hopes. They put a load on it and they watch. The parts that are decoration come off in a load test; the parts that are load bearing stay exactly where they are and take the weight without any discussion. And afterward you know something about that structure that no amount of standing in the street admiring it could have told you.

That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.Romans 10:9

Look at the size of that verse. It is one sentence. It has two items in it. Paul is writing the densest and most careful letter in the New Testament, sixteen chapters of the deepest reasoning anybody has ever done about God, and when he arrives at what a person has to have, the mouth and the heart, he names two things and moves on.

You are already standing on that. Not on a version of it you have to reconstruct first. Romans 10:9 puts the confessing mouth and the believing heart together and calls that saved, and the Name that came up out of your mouth on that board came up by the Holy Spirit, since Scripture says nobody says Jesus is Lord except by Him. What came out of you in four seconds was not the wreckage. It was the frame.

Now, two things this message is not going to do, and I want them said plainly because you would smell it a mile off anyway.

It is not going to hand you the list. Not the historic ones, not a tidy modern one, not five bullet points from me with the serious face on. The exercise belongs to you and it is not a quiz with an answer sheet at the back. If somebody hands you their list you will spend the next year defending theirs instead of finding out what is actually holding you up.

And it is not going to tell you that short is better. It is not. Short is not holy and long is not cowardice. There are people whose list runs to pages and every line of it is load bearing in them, and they are not showing off, and you are not more honest than they are because you can say yours in the time it takes a bucket to land.

You have this either way. His word says the foundation of God stands sure, sealed with the words the Lord knows them that are His, and the Spirit who set that seal did not measure it against the length of anybody's list. The weight is on the structure, not on the inventory.

But you asked whether that is all that is left, so answer the question properly. What was left, when everything that could come off came off, was a Name and a confession. That is not a remnant. That is what the whole thing was built on in the first place, showing through where the render came away.