Sons And Daughters Means You Too

The building on Azusa Street was not a church.

It had been one, years before, and then it had been a stable, and after that a lumber store, and by 1906 it was a wooden shell in Los Angeles with sawdust on the floor and planks laid across nail kegs for seats. There was no platform worth the name. There was no choir loft. People sat on backless boards and put their feet in the sawdust and that was the room.

The man they came to hear was the son of former slaves. He had one good eye. He had been made to sit in a hallway outside a Bible school because he was not permitted in the classroom, and he had listened through the open door, and he had learned it anyway.

And the thing witnesses could not get over, the thing they wrote home about and argued about in the papers, was not the noise.

It was who was in the room.

Because in that city in that year, people did not sit together like that. Black and white on the same plank. Domestic workers next to men with money. Mexican families, Chinese neighbors, immigrants three months off a boat with almost no English, children on the floor at the front. Nobody had planned an integration. Nobody had drawn up a policy. It simply became impossible to keep the seating chart of that city inside that room, because something was falling on the room and it kept falling on the wrong people.

And that was the scandal. Not the volume. The poured-out-on-everybody.

Now, put that room down for a second and let me ask you something.

If you had walked past that building in 1906 and looked in through the door at those planks, would you have gone in?

Or would you have done what you do now, which is to stand at the edge of a room where God is plainly moving and think, with total sincerity and no self pity at all: yes, but not me. Not that sort. Not with what I have got.

The promise has no exemption clause

Before I say another word, hear where you are standing. You are not a person being persuaded into a room. Acts 2 says the Spirit was poured out on all people, and the Holy Spirit is the reason you are still reading instead of closing this.

Here is what I need you to hear tonight, and I am going to say it with my whole chest.

There is nothing wrong with your circumstances. There is something wrong with the sentence you have been saying about yourself, and you have been saying it so long that it sounds like humility.

I am not the kind of person these things happen to.

Beloved, listen. That sentence is not in the Book. Not once, not anywhere, in any form. Go and look at the promise the whole thing is built on and count the categories it excludes.

In the last days, God says, I will pour out My Spirit on all people. Your sons and your daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. Even on My servants, both men and women, I will pour out My Spirit in those days.Acts 2:17 and 18

Read it as a list, because it is one, and the list is doing something deliberate.

Sons and daughters, in a world that would have listened to one of them. Young and old, so neither end of a life can claim it missed the window. Servants, men and women, the people at the very bottom of that society's ladder, named specifically, in a promise, on purpose.

Every line in that list is a door being held open for exactly the person who assumed the promise was for somebody else. That is not decoration. That is the structure of the sentence. The whole thing is built to make self exclusion impossible, and here you are, doing it anyway, quietly, in the fourth row.

And I understand why. It is safer. If you never come near, you never find out. If you keep yourself in the category of person God skips, you are protected from the specific pain of being in the room and going home the same as you came.

I am not going to shame you for that. I have too much respect for how much that has cost you.

But I am going to tell you the truth: it was never a category. You made it. And He never once looked at a person on a plank in the sawdust and consulted a list.

And you have not been overlooked in any of it. The word names sons and daughters and servants and old men out loud, and the Spirit has never once consulted a list before He filled somebody.