A Man Who Likes the Order of Things

His desk has a particular arrangement and it has had it for thirty years.

He would not call himself rigid. He would say, accurately, that he simply finds it easier to think when things are where they belong, and that this is not a moral position, it is a preference, and that people who make a virtue out of chaos are usually just tired.

His faith is the same shape. Steady, structured, thought through. He reads in the morning at the same time. He has kept the same three questions in front of him for a decade. He knows what he believes and he could defend most of it and has.

None of that is a performance. It is genuinely how he is put together.

And for about fourteen years he has been quietly circling something.

He wants to be filled with the Holy Spirit. He is not confused about the doctrine, and he is not one of those men who pretends interest in order to keep an argument going. He wants it, personally, for himself, and he has never asked.

What stops him is a suspicion, and it is a strange one to describe because it is aimed at himself.

He suspects that the very thing he is, the man who likes order, is the disqualification. That God gives this to people who are willing to have their arrangements disturbed, and that a person whose instinct is to keep the desk tidy has already declined the terms without ever being asked.

The sentence, unspoken: I am probably the wrong kind of man for this.

You may know that suspicion. Not that God will not, but that you are constitutionally the wrong applicant.

Both sentences are in the same chapter

Look at the chapter he has been avoiding, because he has read half of it.

First Corinthians fourteen is the longest sustained treatment in the whole Bible of a room where the Spirit is at work, and it is written to a church that had got it out of hand. Paul spends the chapter on the problem, and what he asks for is remarkable if you are expecting a man to pick a side.

He asks for both. He tells them plainly to desire the things of the Spirit and not to forbid them. And then, at the end, having spent forty verses on turn taking and intelligibility and not talking over each other, he closes with this.

Let all things be done decently and in order.1 Corinthians 14:40

That is the last line of the chapter. Not a concession. Not a footnote. The conclusion of the argument, written by the same man who told them a few verses earlier to earnestly desire the very things they had been mishandling.

You are not the exception in that chapter, and 1 Corinthians 14:40 closes a chapter about the Spirit by asking for exactly the thing he values, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the last line of a long correction and lands it on a man who has been circling for fourteen years.

Order is not the opposite of the Spirit

Consider what that ending implies about the whole subject.

If order were an obstacle to the Spirit, ending that chapter with it would be sabotage. Paul would be spending forty verses stirring people up and then closing with a bucket of water. Nobody writes like that.

The only reading that makes sense is that Paul did not think of order and the Spirit as being in competition. He thought of order as the shape in which the Spirit's work becomes usable to a room full of people, which is precisely the intuition that has been running the man's desk for thirty years.

It is worth noticing how practical the whole chapter is, because that will land with him too. Paul is not writing about atmosphere or about how a meeting ought to feel. He is writing about how many people should speak, and in what sequence, and whether somebody should stop when another person begins. Those are logistics. A man who has kept the same three questions in front of him for a decade is reading a passage written by somebody who thought about arrangements the way he does.

You have been holding a conviction the chapter actually shares, because the written word ends its longest treatment of these things by asking for good order, and the Holy Spirit is what turns that from a satisfying reading into permission.

And notice who the order is for. It is not for tidiness. Paul is worried the whole time about whether an outsider walking in would understand anything, and whether the person next to you is helped. The order is a form of love, which is the argument of the chapter immediately before it.

You were never valuing something small, and 1 Corinthians 14 makes order a service to other people rather than a preference to be indulged, and the same Spirit who inspired that chapter is the one who fills.

Nothing about him needs dismantling first

Now the fear underneath, which is not really about chapters.

He suspects there is a price. That God accepts men like him only after taking something apart in them, and that somewhere in this there is a demolition he has been sensibly avoiding.

There is no demolition in the text. Paul does not ask the Corinthians to become disordered people in order to qualify; he asks the opposite, of a church that was already disordered. If anything, the correction runs toward what this man already is.

You were never going to be taken apart first, because 1 Corinthians 14:40 asks a chaotic church to become more like him rather than asking him to become more like them, and it is His Spirit who makes that a relief for a man who has spent fourteen years assuming he was the wrong applicant.