The One Who Sets Up The Room

Eleven years.

That is how long he has been doing the chairs, the cable, the heating, the last door. Eleven years of being in the building before it started and after it finished.

He is not bitter. I want to say that first, because the story people expect here is a bitter one and it would be a lie. He loves it. He would do it if nobody thanked him again for the rest of his life, and some years nobody has.

But here is what he told me once, at about eleven at night, standing by a stack of chairs, not looking at me.

I have set up about four hundred meetings where God did something for somebody. I have never once been the somebody.

And then he laughed, because he is that sort of man, and picked up the last two chairs.

Four hundred rooms. Four hundred times he plugged in the cable and dimmed the lights and stood at the back with his arms folded, glad, genuinely glad, watching people he loves get wrecked in the best way. And every time, at some point in the evening, a very small door closes somewhere behind his ribs and a very quiet sentence goes through him.

Not for you. You are staff.

Now put him down a minute and let me ask you the only question in this message.

How many times have you carried the chairs to a moment you were not in?

Jesus put it in the most domestic terms He had

There is a passage where Jesus is teaching people how to ask God for things, and He does it by talking about breakfast.

He says: which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, gives him a snake? Or if he asks for an egg, hands him a scorpion? And then He lands it.

If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him.Luke 11:13

Read it as a father and not as a theologian.

The comparison is not between a good man and a bad man. It is between the worst version of you and God. Jesus says even at your worst, on your most exhausted evening, you would not hand your child a scorpion, and then He says how much more, which is the hinge of the whole sentence.

And now find the clause about being on duty.

It is not there. There is no exemption for the man who set up the room. There is no footnote saying except staff. The condition Jesus names is asking, and the giver He names is a Father, and the gift He names is the Spirit, which is the thing you have been standing at the back of four hundred rooms watching other people receive.

So let me tell you what is actually true of you tonight, and I am going to say it slowly because you are very good at deflecting this.

You are not the caretaker of a promise. You are inside it. Luke 11 says the Father gives the Holy Spirit to those who ask, and the Holy Spirit who has filled four hundred rooms you built has never regarded you as the furniture in them.

And you have not been overlooked. Hear that. Nothing has gone wrong here and nobody has passed you by. What has happened is subtler and more ordinary, and it is this: you have never asked, because you have been busy, and because asking felt like something you would have to stop and be a person to do, and there was always a cable.

That is not a failure of faith and I will not let it be framed as one. It is a man with his hands full.

The room this house is named for, in a stable in Los Angeles in 1906, had a man at the front of it who had spent his life being the help. He had been made to listen to a Bible school class from the hallway because he was not permitted in the room. He was the definition of staff. And the fire fell on him, in a building with sawdust on the floor, because God has not once run a room by the rota.