The Door Was Left Open

There was a man who took the class from the hallway.

He was not allowed in the room. That was the arrangement in Houston in those years and everybody in the building understood it, the teacher included, and the way it was managed was that a chair was put outside in the corridor and the door was left ajar so he could hear.

So that is where William Seymour sat. In a hallway, on a chair, with a notebook on his knee, listening to a class he was not permitted to attend, through a gap in a door somebody else had decided how wide to open.

Picture the ordinary humiliation in that. Not the dramatic kind. The daily kind. Men walk past you to go in. Men walk past you to come out. You hear the laughter from inside and you do not know what the joke was. You catch about nine words in ten and you write down the nine and you guess at the tenth. When it finishes you fold your notebook and you get up off your chair, and nobody in that room could have told you the color of the wall you had been looking at for six weeks.

He was the son of people who had been slaves. He had lost the sight in one eye. He had no standing anywhere at all, and by every measure anybody in that corridor would have used, he was the least likely man in the building to matter.

Within about a year, in a plain building on a street in Los Angeles, with sawdust down and mismatched chairs and no advertising to speak of, something began around that man that people crossed oceans to see. And the thing the witnesses could not get over, the detail that turns up again and again in what they wrote at the time, was not the noise and it was not the tongues.

It was who was in the room together.

Black and white in the same building, sitting anywhere, in a city that did not do that. Domestic servants and businessmen. Children down the front. A one-eyed man with no credentials at the head of it, and half the time not at the head of it at all, just kneeling behind a stack of crates with his head down while it went on around him.

The door had been left ajar to keep him out.

He had gone through it anyway, and then he had taken it off its hinges.

And you know why I am telling you this, because you have a corridor of your own, and yours may have nothing to do with a classroom.

Yours might be the sheet on the noticeboard with the columns on it. Yours might be the group of people who all seem to know a vocabulary you never learned. Yours might just be the settled inner conviction, arrived at years ago and never once re-examined, that whatever God is doing in that building, He is doing it through the sort of people who are qualified for it, and you are the sort of person who helps put the chairs away.

The qualification you are waiting for was never the qualification

Before the teaching, hear where you already stand. You are not waiting to be made usable. Acts 4 says they took note that these men had been with Jesus, and the Spirit never once asked to see anybody's training first.

I want to say something first that half the messages on this subject get wrong, and it does real damage.

Training is good. Study is good. The person in your church who has spent six years learning to handle Scripture properly has done a fine and generous thing, and they did it so that you would be fed well, and there is nothing holier about being untaught. I have never once met a person who was made more useful by knowing less. Anybody who tells you that learning is pride has confused two entirely different things and you should let it go past you.

This message is not against the trained. It is for the ones who have concluded that the untrained are not needed.

Because look at what happened in a courtroom in Jerusalem, in front of the most educated men in the nation, and listen to the exact reasoning the court used.

Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and understood that they were untrained and ordinary men, they were astonished, and they recognised that they had been with Jesus.Acts 4:13

Read the shape of that. The court did the arithmetic in public and got a result that would not go into the box.

Untrained. They checked. It was not a slur, it was an observation, and it was accurate: these two had no schooling in the law and everyone present knew it.

Ordinary. Not remarkable. Not naturally impressive. Fishermen from the wrong end of the country with the wrong accent.

And then the court, which had every reason to reach a different conclusion, reached this one instead: they had been with Jesus.

That was the only variable left. They had exhausted every other explanation and the residue was company.

Now here is what that verse does not say, and it matters, because this is where people over-read it. It does not say the training was worthless. It does not say the court was wrong to be educated. It says the thing that came out of those men could not be accounted for by education, because it had not come from there. It had come from proximity.

The qualification is not what you know. It is who you have been with.

And that qualification is available to a man on a chair in a corridor, taking the class through a gap in a door, exactly as available as it is to the men inside the room. It is possibly more available, because the corridor teaches you very early that you have nothing to lean on, and a man with nothing to lean on leans on the right thing.

And you have not been passed over by anybody. The word records the qualification as time spent with Him and nothing else, and the Holy Spirit fell hardest on a room led by a man who had heard his own lessons through a doorway.