The Room You Keep Ready For One Kind Of Visit

In my grandmother's house there was a room nobody was allowed to use.

It had the good cushions in it. It had the brass tray and the small glasses with gold rims, and the carpet that came from her mother, and it was swept every single week of her life. It was for guests. Not for the neighbor who came in through the kitchen without knocking, and not for the cousins, and certainly not for children. For a guest. The kind of guest who arrives once in a decade and is spoken about afterward for years.

She died at eighty seven and I can count on one hand the number of times that room was used.

Everything that actually happened in that house happened in the kitchen. Every argument, every reconciliation, every long night, every plate of food pushed toward somebody who had said they were not hungry and then ate anyway. The kitchen was crowded and loud and slightly burnt and it was where we all lived.

And the good room sat there, swept, waiting, ready, empty.

I want to tell you about a man I know who has done the same thing with his heart.

Nine years ago, at a conference he attended reluctantly, he was undone. That is his word. Undone, in a hotel ballroom with bad lighting, in front of nine hundred strangers. He came home different for about six weeks and everyone in his family noticed.

He has been keeping the good room ready ever since.

He knows what that visit looked like. He knows the shape of it, the size of it, what it did to his breathing. And when something smaller comes to the door, a verse that will not leave him alone on a Wednesday, an urge to phone his brother, a strange thickness in his throat during a hymn he has sung four hundred times, he does not open. Not on purpose. It is more that he glances at it, decides it is not the guest, and goes back to sweeping the room.

Nine years of knocking, and a man in the corridor deciding it is only the neighbor.

He is standing at the door in the clothes He chose

There is a sentence in Revelation that gets used mostly at the front end of somebody's faith and then quietly put away, as though it were an entrance instruction and not a permanent description of how He behaves.

Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.Revelation 3:20

Take that as spoken over you now. You are being knocked for this evening. The word says He stands at the door in the present tense, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been carrying that knock into ordinary Wednesdays for nine years.

Read who He is saying it to. He is saying it to a church. To people already His, already gathered, already meeting on the right day in the right building. And He is outside, knocking, describing Himself as somebody waiting for a door to open.

Which means the knocking is not a thing that happened once at the beginning of your faith. It is His posture toward you now, this evening, while you are reading. You are being knocked for. That is not my sentiment about you; His word says He stands at the door and knocks, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries that knock into an actual Wednesday afternoon in an actual corridor.

And notice what He does not do. He does not announce the format. He does not say, I will come in the way I came before, so keep that room swept and refuse the rest.

There was a man in the seventeen hundreds who went, without wanting to, to a small meeting on Aldersgate Street. Somebody was reading aloud from a preface to a commentary. Not a miracle. Not a mountain. A man reading a preface, badly, most likely, in a cramped room. And in the middle of that his heart was strangely warmed.

Then he did the thing almost nobody quotes. He built a timetable: small groups at set hours, plain questions asked out loud, and a great enormous amount of time in prisons and mines, where the warmed heart actually went. He did not spend the next fifty years on Aldersgate Street waiting for the preface to be read again.

That is the invention and it is yours tonight. A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and the way he held both was by answering the door in whatever form the knock arrived.

You are not required to reproduce it. Take that sentence slowly, because it is the one keeping you in the corridor. Nowhere is it written that the ballroom was the correct format and the Wednesday verse is a lesser substitute. Scripture says He is the same yesterday and today and forever, and it is His Spirit and not the size of the room who makes a visit real.

Here is what I will not say to you: that the ballroom was immature, or emotional, or something you have outgrown. It was Him. He met a man who needed to be undone and He undid him. He is simply not obliged to knock twice in the same rhythm at a door He already owns.