The Low Place
THE LOW PLACE On Serving God Where No One Is Watching
For the men who hold a pulpit in their chest and a broom in their hands.
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PREFACE
I want to be honest with you before you read a word of this. I wrote it because I needed it. There is a kind of man who carries a burden for souls and yet spends his days in work that no one sees. He empties the trash. He fixes the leak. He pushes the cart down the long hall after the children have gone home. And somewhere under the noise of the floor buffer he wonders if God meant for him to do something larger.
I am that man, or near enough to him that the difference does not matter. So I will not write to you from a height. I will write to you from the same low place where you are standing, and I will tell you what I have found there, which is that the low place is not a waiting room for a better calling. It is the calling. It is the very ground God chose for you to meet Him on.
This is a short and plain word. I have tried to write the way an old Puritan would speak to a friend across a kitchen table, slow and weighty and without ornament. I have leaned on Scripture because Scripture is the only thing that can carry the weight I am asking it to carry. Every verse is from the English Standard Version, quoted exactly, because the word of God deserves to be handled with care.
Read it slowly. Do not rush to the comfort. The comfort is real, but it comes after the searching, and the searching is where God does His best work.
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ONE. THE ACHE YOU CARRY
There is an ache in the man who serves God in a small place. He does not always name it, but he feels it. It rises up on the long afternoons when the work is dull and the building is empty. It rises up when he hears another man preach and thinks, I could carry that word too, if only someone had given me the chance. It rises up when he looks at his hands and sees calluses where he once imagined a Bible would sit.
I know this ache because I have lived inside it. I came to Christ late, after thirty-five years of running, and when the Lord laid hold of me He laid hold of all of me at once. The hunger came on like a flood. I wanted to study, to teach, to pour out what had been poured into me. And then I went to work the next morning and pushed a mop down a middle school hallway, and the distance between the flood inside me and the floor under me felt like a wound.
Maybe you feel it differently. Maybe you stock shelves, or drive a route, or sit in a cubicle entering numbers that no one will ever thank you for. The shape of the work changes from man to man. The ache is the same. It is the sense that there is more in you than your day will hold, and that God has somehow placed you below the level of your own desire.
I want to be careful here, because this ache is not a simple thing. Part of it is holy. The Spirit of God stirs a man to love what is good and to long to spend himself on it, and that longing is not sin. But part of it is not holy at all. Part of it is the old pride that wants to be seen, that measures a life by its platform, that cannot rest in a hidden work because hidden work does not feed the hunger to be known.
The trouble is that these two run together so closely that a man cannot always tell them apart. The same heart that longs to serve Christ also longs to be admired for serving Him, and the second longing dresses itself in the clothes of the first. This is why the ache must be searched before it can be soothed. If you reach for comfort before you reach for honesty, you will only end up flattering the very pride that is making you miserable.
So let us begin there. Not with a promise that God will lift you out of the low place, but with a harder and better question. What if the low place is exactly where He means to do the deepest work He has ever done in you?
Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!
Psalm 139:23-24
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TWO. THE ROOT BENEATH THE ACHE
When a man is discontent with his lot, he almost always blames the lot. He thinks the problem is the work, or the wage, or the place. If only the circumstance would change, he tells himself, the discontent would lift. But this is rarely true. A man who is restless in a low place will usually be restless in a high one, because the restlessness was never about the place. It was about the heart that carried him into it.
The Puritans understood this with a clarity we have mostly lost. Thomas Watson wrote a whole treatise on the rare jewel of Christian contentment, and Jeremiah Burroughs another, and both of them said the same thing. Contentment is not a change in your circumstances. It is a change in you. It is learned, not given, and it is learned in the school of the low place, where God strips a man of the props he leaned on and teaches him to lean on Christ alone.
Consider what the apostle Paul says, writing from a prison cell with chains on his wrists.
Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.
Philippians 4:11-13
Notice that he calls it something he learned. He was not born content. He did not become content the moment he was converted. He learned it over years, in hunger and in plenty, in prison and in freedom, and the learning was slow and costly. If the greatest missionary the church has ever known had to be schooled in contentment, you and I should not be surprised that we are still in the lower grades.
The root beneath the ache runs down to this. We believe, somewhere down in the cellar of the heart, that our worth is measured by our station. We think a man who teaches is worth more than a man who sweeps. We think a name that is known is a life that matters, and a name that is hidden is a life half wasted. And as long as we believe that lie, no station will ever satisfy us, because there is always a higher one, and the man on the top step is still looking up.
The gospel takes an axe to that root. It tells you that your worth was never in your station at all. It was bought with blood, fixed in heaven, and sealed by the Spirit before you ever lifted a finger to work. A man whose worth rests in Christ can sweep a floor for the glory of God and lose nothing, because there was never anything to lose. His name is written where moth and rust cannot reach it.
But the heart does not learn this in a day. It must be searched, and the searching hurts, because it uncovers how much of our religion has been about us all along.
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THREE. THE GOD WHO WORKS IN HIDDEN PLACES
If you want to understand the low place, you must understand the God who fills it. And the strange and wonderful truth of Scripture is that our God has always done His greatest work where no one was watching.
Think of where He kept His own Son for thirty years. The Word who made the worlds, the eternal second person of the blessed Trinity, spent the overwhelming weight of His earthly life in a carpenter's shop in a town so small and so despised that men asked whether anything good could come out of it. Thirty years of hidden labor. Thirty years of sawdust and sweat and ordinary obedience. And then three years of public ministry. The proportion alone should silence us. Our Lord spent ten times as long in the hidden place as in the seen one.
Think of Moses, who spent forty years on the back side of a desert keeping another man's sheep before God ever spoke to him from the bush. Think of David, anointed king as a boy and then sent right back to the sheepfold, learning faithfulness in obscurity for years before he ever sat on a throne. Think of the long silent years of preparation that God seems to require before He trusts a man with anything large.
There is a pattern here, and it is not an accident. God hides His servants before He uses them, and very often He keeps on hiding them even while He uses them. The work that matters most to Him is rarely the work that draws a crowd. He is building something in the dark that the light would only spoil.
This is a comfort, but it is a bracing one. It means your hidden years are not wasted years. The God who spent three decades preparing His own Son in obscurity is not careless with your obscurity. He is doing something in you on the long afternoons that He could not do any other way. But it also means you must give up the idea that the hidden place is a delay before the real work begins. For most of God's servants, the hidden place was the real work, and the seen part, when it came at all, was small by comparison.
I take great comfort in this as a man who works with his hands in an empty building. The Lord I serve knows the smell of a workshop. He knows what it is to spend years doing faithful, unremarkable labor that no record was kept of. When I push my cart down the hall, I am not far from Him. I am walking the very road He walked for thirty years.
Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us? And they took offense at him.
Mark 6:3
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FOUR. ALL WORK AS WORSHIP
We have inherited a quiet heresy in the church, and most of us hold it without ever saying it aloud. It is the belief that there is sacred work and there is secular work, and that the sacred work, the preaching and the missions and the visible ministry, is the real service of God, while the rest is just how we pay the bills until we can get to the real thing.
The Reformers fought hard against this very lie. Before the Reformation, men spoke of the religious life as something only monks and priests could enter, and the farmer and the cobbler were thought to live a lower kind of existence, tolerated by God but not truly dedicated to Him. The recovery of the gospel brought with it the recovery of vocation, the great truth that every honest calling is a station appointed by God, and that a Christian milkmaid milking her cow to the glory of God does a work as truly holy as the preacher in his pulpit.
This was not a clever idea the Reformers invented. They found it in the text. Listen to how the apostle speaks to slaves, the lowest workers in the whole Roman world, men and women whose labor was owned by another and counted for nothing.
Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.
Colossians 3:23-24
Sit with that and let it land. The work you do, the unglamorous repeated work of your ordinary day, is to be done as for the Lord and not for men. And the Lord Himself, not your supervisor and not the people who never thank you, is the one who keeps the account and pays the wage. There is an inheritance attached to the way you mop a floor.
This changes everything about the low place. If your work is worship, then the man scrubbing a toilet for the glory of God is not doing a lesser thing than the man behind a microphone. He is doing the same thing, offering himself to God through the work of his hands, and the God who sees in secret is watching both with equal pleasure. The only question that matters is not how visible the work is, but for whom it is done.
I have learned to preach sermons to no congregation, in empty rooms, with a rag in my hand. I have learned that the floor I clean is an altar if I give it to God. This is not a way of making peace with a disappointing life. It is the truth about all of life, and the man who sees it is set free from the tyranny of being seen.
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FIVE. THE PULPIT YOU ALREADY HAVE
Something I had to learn slowly surprised me when it came. The man who longs to teach and is given no platform usually already stands on the only platform that matters. He simply has not recognized it yet.
You think you have no pulpit because you have no church that has called you to one. But you are watched all day by people who would never sit under a sermon. The man at the next station sees how you carry a bad morning. The student in the hallway sees whether you have a kind word or a cold one. Your wife and your children see, more clearly than anyone on earth, whether the faith you profess on Sunday is the same faith that governs you on Tuesday. There is no preacher alive with a congregation as attentive as the one watching you in your ordinary day, because they are not listening to your words. They are reading your life.
This is the harder pulpit and the truer one. A man can preach a fine sermon and go home and be a tyrant, and the sermon will not save him. But a man who is gentle to a frightened child in an empty hallway, who does his work without complaint, who answers an insult with patience, preaches a sermon with his body that no one can argue with. The apostle Peter said that even wives could win husbands without a word, by conduct alone, and what is true there is true everywhere. The watching world is more moved by a holy life than by a clever argument.
I think often of the people God has set in my path precisely because I am where I am. The student in crisis who would never walk into a church found a believer in the one place she did not expect one, in the custodian who happened to be there. If I had the platform I once wanted, I would not have been in that hallway. The very lowness of the place put me exactly where a soul needed me.
So stop waiting for a pulpit. You have one. It is your life, lived out in front of people who are watching whether you know it or not. Preach with it. Let the word you cannot speak from a stage be spoken in the way you bear your burden, the way you treat the least person in the room, the way you keep your temper when you have every excuse to lose it. That sermon will be heard.
And if God should ever give you the other kind of pulpit, the visible one, you will be ready for it only because you were faithful in this one first. He does not give the platform to the man who despises the floor. He gives it to the man who learned to glorify Him on the floor and would have been content to stay there forever.
Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.
1 Peter 2:12
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SIX. WHEN THE HEART STILL REBELS
I would be lying to you if I ended the matter there, as though seeing the truth were the same as living it. You can know that your work is worship and still resent it on Thursday. You can believe that God hides His servants and still burn with envy when another man is lifted up. The mind can be convinced while the heart goes right on rebelling, and any honest man knows the distance between the two.
So what do we do when the heart still rebels? When the contentment we preach to ourselves will not hold, and the old ache comes roaring back, and we find ourselves angry at God for the smallness of our portion?
First, we confess it plainly. We do not pretend the rebellion is not there. The Psalms are full of men telling God exactly how the discontent feels, holding nothing back, and God did not strike them down for it. He recorded their words in His book. Asaph nearly lost his footing entirely, watching the wicked prosper while he kept his heart clean for nothing, as it seemed to him. He says so without flinching.
And then notice the turn. Asaph does not reason his way out of the bitterness. He goes into the presence of God, into the sanctuary, and there everything looks different. The thing that cured him was not a better argument. It was a clearer sight of God. When he stopped staring at his own portion and started looking at the Lord, the envy died of its own accord, because it could not survive the presence of the One who was his true portion all along.
Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
Psalm 73:25-26
This is the pattern for us. When the heart rebels, we do not argue with it in the dark. We carry it into the presence of God. We open the word, we bend the knee, we get ourselves into the place where God is, and we let the sight of Him do what no self talk can do. The discontent is not reasoned away. It is burned away by a better glory.
And the great mercy runs underneath it all. The very fact that you fight this battle is a sign of life. The dead do not war against their own pride. A corpse feels no shame at its discontent. If you grieve over the rebellion in your heart, the grief itself is the Spirit of God within you, refusing to let you rest in what is beneath your calling in Christ. Do not despair over the war. The war is the evidence that you are His.
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SEVEN. THE PORTION THAT CANNOT BE TAKEN
Everything I have said comes down to one word, and that word is portion. Asaph found it. The Levites built their whole lives on it. When the land of Canaan was divided among the tribes, every tribe received a piece of ground except one. The tribe of Levi was given no inheritance, no fields, no territory of its own. Instead the Lord said to them that He Himself would be their portion. They got God instead of ground.
Sit with that for a moment, because it is the whole secret of the low place. The man who has God for his portion has lost the ability to be impoverished. You may take his platform, his recognition, his title, his comfort, every visible good thing, and you will not have touched his true wealth, because his true wealth is the living God, and no man can take that from him. He is rich in the only currency that survives the grave.
This is why a man can be content in a low place. He rests there because he possesses a treasure that the height and the depth of his circumstances cannot reach. The world cannot understand this. The world measures a man by what he has and what he is seen to be. But the man whose portion is God looks at the whole ledger of earthly station and finds that it has become strangely small, because he is holding something next to which a kingdom is a trifle.
Late as I came to Him, He is my portion. That is the thing I cannot get over. A man who wasted thirty-five years, who came stumbling in at the back of the day, was given the same Christ, the same Spirit, the same inheritance as the man who walked with God from his mother's knee. There is no second class in the kingdom. The God who is the portion of the apostle is the portion of the custodian, full and entire, withholding nothing.
So I will tell you what I tell myself on the long afternoons. You have not been given a small life. You have been given God, and a life with God in it is never small, whatever the world makes of the room you stand in. The floor under your feet is holy ground if you are standing on it with Him.
Hold fast to your portion. The low place cannot rob you. It can only press you nearer to the One who has been your treasure all along, and that pressing, painful as it is, is the kindest thing He could do for you. He is not keeping you from a better life. He is keeping you for Himself.
"The LORD is my portion," says my soul, "therefore I will hope in him."
Lamentations 3:24
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BENEDICTION
I have written all this to you, my brothers and sisters, but I have preached it to myself the whole way through, because I need it as much as any man who will ever read it. The low place is not behind me. I will go to work on Monday and push the same cart down the same hall, and the ache will likely rise again on some long afternoon, and I will have to carry my rebel heart back into the presence of God one more time and let the sight of Him do its work.
But I go back to that hall as a man with a portion. I go back knowing that the God who hid His own Son in a workshop for thirty years is not careless with my hidden years. I go back knowing that the floor is an altar and the watching faces a congregation. And the wage for my labor is not a sum I have earned and stored against my own account. It is an inheritance kept for me in Christ, given to a son and not paid to a hired man, secured by His work and not by mine.
There is a day coming when I will stand before the only one whose opinion will matter, and I will not stand there hoping my floors were clean enough. I will stand there clothed in Christ, accepted in Him before a single work of mine is weighed, so that whatever reward His grace is pleased to give will be grace heaped upon grace and no part of it a debt He owed me. The man whose standing rests there can work hard all his days and fear nothing on the last one, because the verdict was settled at the cross long before the labor began.
May the Lord give you the same sight. May He search your heart until the pride is uncovered, steady you in the place where He has set you, and lift your eyes from your portion of ground to your portion in Him. And when He has done that work in you, may He send you to the next man in the next low place with the same word, that he too may learn the secret you have learned.
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.