Recruited From the Line

They handed out number cards at eight, and Trina's said forty-three.

She had a system by now. Eleven Saturdays, and the system was this: get there early enough to be inside the first hour, stand facing the parking lot instead of the door, and do not make conversation, because conversation leads to questions and questions lead to the part where she explains the hours they cut at the plant.

The line ran along the side of the fellowship hall, past the propane tank and the two folding tables where they set out the bread. Cold enough that morning for everybody's breath to show. The man ahead of her had a little boy on his shoulders who kept trying to grab the awning.

Inside, something went wrong. A woman came out from the kitchen door holding her lower back with both hands, walking the careful walk of somebody who has just lifted the wrong thing at the wrong angle, and a man in a green apron came out behind her looking at the line with an expression Trina recognized from her old shift supervisor. He came down the row of people saying it out loud, once every few steps.

"Anybody here able to lift? Anybody able to lift?"

Nobody moved. That is the thing about a line. A line has a direction, and everybody in it knows which way they are facing, and none of them are facing the kitchen.

Trina said it before she thought about it. "I can lift."

He came back three steps. He took a green apron off the hook by the door, the same apron the others had on, no different in any way, and he put it in her hands. He said, "Canned goods, that table there, you tell them how you want it stacked."

She worked two hours. She stacked green beans and corn and a whole pallet of tomato sauce, and she told a teenager how she wanted it done and he did it that way, and somewhere in the second hour she looked down at the apron and understood that nobody had asked her a single question first.

Maybe you know what it is to face the parking lot instead of the door. To have a whole explanation ready for a question nobody has asked yet, and to carry the quiet certainty that when it comes to God's people you are on the receiving end of the arrangement and that is where you stay. You are counted inside a company God assembled on purpose, and He did the counting before anybody in the kitchen knew your name. Scripture says the choosing is His and it is finished, and the Holy Spirit is the One who walks that finished thing all the way down to the sidewalk where you are standing.

The choosing was of a company, not a contestant

Here is the thing that has to be said plainly before anything else, because half the trouble people have with this subject comes from a picture that was never in the Bible.

When Scripture speaks about being chosen, it is speaking about a people. The church is a corporate thing, an assembly, a company, a body. It is not a private arrangement between Christ and one heart, and it is not a romance. Nobody in Scripture is picked out of a crowd the way a coach picks a player, and God does not run an audition. He assembled a people for Himself, He said so out loud, and the reason it lands on you this morning is not that you stood out. It is that you are in the company.

You are inside that assembly, and you were inside it before you had anything to offer it. The word says God chose, and the same Holy Spirit who breathed those words is the One who makes them true in a fellowship hall on a cold Saturday.

Now look at who James says God went and got.

Hearken, my beloved brethren, Hath not God chosen the poor of this world rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom which he hath promised to them that love him?James 2:5

Read that as a recruiter would read it. God went to the line. Not past the line, not around it. He went to the exact place where a room full of people are all facing the parking lot, and He assembled a company out of them, and He wrote down heirs beside their names.

You have an inheritance in a kingdom, and it is already yours by promise rather than pending on a review. That is what the word says heirs means, and His Spirit is the seal on the whole arrangement, the mark of ownership God puts on what He has claimed.

Nobody in that kitchen was auditioning

Trina thought she had been asked because she said she could lift. That is what she thought all through the first hour, and it is what most of us think all our lives: that we got asked because of the one thing we happened to be able to do that morning.

But watch it again. The apron came off the same hook as every other apron. There was no interview and no probation. She was not made a volunteer that morning; she was handed the clothes of a company she was already close enough to touch, and the handing over was the whole ceremony.

That is how it works with God's people, and it is one of the most disorienting mercies in Scripture. There is no probationary tier of the church. There is no bench. The apron and the bag come off the same table, and they go to the same person, and the God who set that table has never once run out of aprons.

You are dressed in a righteousness you did not earn and could not have bought, and it fits you right now. His word calls it a garment given, not a garment achieved, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the dressing.