You Live Here

She is there forty minutes early, the way she has been there forty minutes early since she was nineteen, and this morning there is nothing for her to do.

Somebody else has put the chairs out. Somebody else has the trolley, and the urn is already ticking, and the water jug for the front has been filled and carried through and set down on its little mat by a teenager who did it perfectly well. Her name came off the rota three weeks ago. Her own idea. She said the word sabbatical out loud in a meeting and everybody was very pleased with her and somebody used the word wise.

So she stands in the doorway of a room she has known for twenty-two years, holding her coat, and she can feel her hands starting to look for something. She straightens the second row, which does not need straightening. She notices a hymn book with a bent corner and she picks it up and holds it, and then she does not know where to put it down, and she stands there with a bent hymn book in her hand at twenty past nine like a woman who has been made redundant by a God she has never once heard complain about her.

Then a friend waves at her from the fourth row and pats the chair, and she sits, and it is the strangest and most uncomfortable four minutes of her week.

Perhaps you are in the doorway with the hymn book. Perhaps your version has nothing to do with chairs at all: perhaps you are the one who prays for everybody and cannot receive it, or the one who has a folder on your desk with everybody else's needs in it, or the one whose whole sense of being welcome here rests on the fact that you are useful and you have never let anybody down. You have worked for God for years. You would not know how to be off duty in His house. And I want to say, before anything else, that the work was not a mistake, and He was not humouring you, and this message is not going to take a single job away from you.

Two ways to be in a house

You are a child of the house, and it is already settled. The Spirit who was given to you has written this truth into your spirit, so you do not have to earn the room you were born into. You have the right to become a child of God, and that standing is not a temporary arrangement.

The slave does not remain in the house forever. The son remains forever.John 8:35

He is not being unkind about servants. He is describing two different kinds of tenure. A servant's place rests on the work, and when the work stops, the reason for the room stops. But your place rests on a birth, and a birth is not the sort of thing that comes up for review. The promise stands that you are no longer a servant but a son.

So hear what that means where you are standing. You are in this house on the second footing and not the first. The Holy Spirit bears witness with your spirit that you are a child of God, and that witness is not a contract that a quiet Sunday could trigger. You have boldness and access with confidence, because you are a joint heir with Christ.

You knew that. You have known it doctrinally since you were about twenty. What has never happened is that anybody made you sit down in it. It is written that you are fellow citizens and members of the household of God, and you were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise. Sit down, for you belong here.

The brother in the field

There is a man in Luke 15 who has been standing in that same doorway for years, and almost nobody notices him because the story is famous for somebody else.

He is the older brother. He is out in the field, working, on the day of the party, and when he hears the music he does not go in. And what he says to his father is one of the saddest sentences in Scripture, and it is a sentence a great many faithful people could say tonight: all these years I have been serving you, and I never disobeyed a command of yours, and you never gave me so much as a young goat for my friends.

Look at the arithmetic in that. Years of service, no disobedience, and nothing received. He is standing in his own father's yard, keeping an account. He has lived in that house his entire life as an employee with an unusually long tenure and an unusually good record, and it has made him miserable, and it has made him unable to enjoy his own family.

And the father does not argue with the record. He does not correct the ledger. He says one thing, and it undoes the whole framework in nine words: Child, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.

Not you will be. Not once you have been a bit less resentful. Always, and already. So take that sentence for yourself now: you are always with Him, and it is written in the Book and not invented by me, and the same Spirit who put those words there is the one making them land on the hymn book in your hand.

What actually changes

Here is the part I want to be careful with, because the wrong version of this message ends with a tired person feeling guilty about the rota, and that would be a poor exchange.

Nothing about your service was contemptible. God received every early morning of it. Some of it was the finest thing in your life and you know it.

What moves is not the work. What moves is what the work is resting on. In a family, children do jobs. They lay tables and carry things and fetch what is needed, and nobody at any point in a healthy household imagines that the jobs are the reason the child lives there. The child works because they belong, not in order to belong, and that single reversal changes what it feels like to fill a water jug.

You have been given the standing of a child, and it holds while the feeling is completely absent, because what is written makes it a fact about position rather than a description of the weather, and the Holy Spirit does not withdraw on the mornings the warmth does. If the word Father sticks in your throat because of a man whose face comes up when you say it, your place in this house is not one gram less secure this morning, and nobody here is asking you to produce an emotion you have not got.