When the Bell Called Us Christians

For the believer who knows a dozen church names by heart and can't say her own out loud.

When was the last time you said what you are and then simply stopped talking?

Not to God, where you're fluent and unguarded. Not in the car with the radio off, where you say a great deal to nobody. I mean to a person standing in front of you, in the middle of an ordinary day, with a full stop after it and nothing added on to make it easier for them.

She's in the choir room on a Thursday with eleven folders open on the piano lid, because the joint service is on Sunday and somebody has to reconcile the music.

Every folder is labeled. Two of them have the name of the church printed down the spine. One has a sticker. One has a hand-written tab in marker that's been redone at least three times over the years. She knows all eleven names by heart, and she could tell you which two rooms don't share a hymn tune and which three don't send anybody to the joint service anymore.

Then the bell in the tower goes for the half hour, the way it has since 1891, and she realizes it never distinguished between any of them.

The bell that called your town to prayer never once asked which folder you came from. The written Word records the oldest name being given in a trading city before any later name existed, and the Holy Spirit keeps it live in your mouth today rather than leaving it in an account.

What Eleven Folders Teach You About Yourself

She's excellent at this. That's the trouble.

Six years of reconciling music has taught her which room prefers which setting, which one won't sing a particular verse, and which one needs the page numbers printed larger. She's become fluent in eleven dialects of the same faith, and she's genuinely glad to serve them.

What she's also become is careful. Somebody fluent in eleven rooms learns exactly how each one hears a sentence, and that skill doesn't switch off when the folders are shut. So when a neighbor asks her at the shop what church she's with, she gives the answer that will land softest rather than the one that's simply true.

You've done that. It isn't dishonesty, and it certainly isn't doubt. It's the occupational hazard of anybody who's spent years being careful for other people's sake and has forgotten she's allowed to be plain.

The Word That Came Up the Street

There's a city in the account called Antioch, a long way north of Jerusalem, crowded with traders and people who weren't from there.

Believers scattered by trouble arrived and began speaking about Jesus to Greeks, which hadn't been planned and hadn't been agreed anywhere. A great many of them trusted Him. Barnabas came up to look at it, and the account says that when he saw it he was glad. He went to find Saul, brought him back, and the two of them taught in that city for a full year.

The closing line of the verse is this:

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

There's no ceremony in it at all. Nobody voted, no council sat, no founding document was drawn up to settle what they ought to be known as. The word came up the street from people who'd been watching for twelve months.

You're named for whose you are before anybody files you by which folder you sing from. Scripture hands that name to disciples who never applied for it, and the Holy Spirit keeps the description current in you rather than historical.

A Bell Doesn't Know Who's Listening

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

A bell has no way of addressing anybody in particular. It rings into a whole town at once, and every person who hears it hears the same sound, whatever room they're walking toward or away from. It cannot be aimed, and it has never once been able to sort.

The word given at Antioch works the same way. It wasn't addressed to a faction, because there were no factions yet to address. It went out over a whole group of ordinary people at once, and everyone it landed on heard the same word.

That's why she can know eleven names by heart and still be held by one. The eleven are addressed. The one is simply rung.

You're held by a name that was never aimed at a faction, so it lands on you whole. The written Word gives it to a whole company of disciples at once, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping that sound live over you now.

I'm Not Asking You to Close a Folder

Let me be plain, because there's a version of this message that would hurt you and I won't write it.

Not one of those eleven folders is a corruption of anything. Somebody in every one of those rooms loved Christ at real cost, and part of the reason there's a joint service at all is that they did. I'm not asking you to rank the spines or to be quieter about your own.

This isn't a twelfth folder. It's the bell over all of them. If this word ever became one more tab to write in marker, it would have become exactly the thing it describes the absence of, and I'd rather say nothing.

You can keep your folder and stand under the bell, because holding both costs you neither. Scripture sets the Antioch name underneath every later name without canceling a single one, and the Holy Spirit keeps it load bearing instead of competing.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

Written by Imani This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.