The Other Church On The Same Road

There are two buildings on that road and about a mile between them.

She has gone to the first one since she was seven years old. Her mother went. Her mother's mother is in the ground behind it. She could walk it in the dark, and some winters she has.

The other one she has driven past twice a week for nineteen years.

She knows the roof needs doing. She knows they put a new sign up in the spring and she thought it was a bit much. She could not tell you one name of one person who walks through that door, and she never once, in nineteen years, wondered what any of them were carrying that week.

Not out of spite. She has nothing against them. If you asked her she would say they seem nice enough and she hopes they are doing well.

That is the whole thing, right there. She hopes they are doing well, in the way you hope a stranger's football team wins.

One Tuesday in February her car would not start on the verge outside their gate, in the rain, and a woman came out with an umbrella and stood over her while she rang for help, and they talked for forty minutes about nothing.

And driving home she cried, and she could not have told you why.

Now set her down a minute and think about your own road.

Whose building do you go past twice a week without ever once thinking about the people inside it?

The last thing He prayed before they came for Him

I am not going to argue anybody into anything this morning. That is not what this is, and it is not what I do.

I want to show you one sentence, and then I want to leave you alone with it.

On the last night, in the last hours, with the men who were coming for Him already on their way, Jesus prayed out loud in front of His friends. And of all the things He could have asked His Father for on that night, this is what He asked.

That all of them may be one, Father, just as You are in Me and I am in You. May they also be in Us so that the world may believe that You have sent Me.John 17:21

Read it once more, slowly, the way you would read a letter from somebody who has gone. You are inside that request and so are they, and the Holy Spirit has been answering it up and down a mile of tarmac since before either building had a roof on it.

Sit with the timing of it. A man with hours left does not waste a request. He asks for the thing that has been on Him the longest.

And now look at where you are standing in it. You are inside that prayer. Not near it, not eligible for it. Inside it. Jesus said those who will believe in Me through their message, which is you, and He asked for you by name before you existed, and the Holy Spirit is the One who has been answering that prayer in every generation since. You have never had to earn your way into that sentence. You were prayed for by the Son of God on the worst night of His life.

So here is the plain thing, said plainly, the way we say things on a porch.

The line on your road is not a doctrine. It is a habit. And this house does not go around telling folk their building is a corruption or that they ought to leave it, because that is not a gift, that is a verdict, and we do not hand those out here. Stay exactly where you are. Love your own. Bury your dead behind your own wall the way your family always has.

But you are allowed to want the mile.

The word says He prayed that they would be one so the world would believe, and the Holy Spirit never once treated that mile of tarmac as a boundary. He goes up and down it all week. He is in both buildings on a Sunday morning and He does not have to choose. You are the only one who has been choosing.

And I will tell you what happened in a stable in Los Angeles in 1906, since this house is named for it. It was not a policy that put the wrong people on the same plank. Something fell on that room and it kept falling on people the city had already sorted, and once it had fallen there was no putting the sorting back.

That is not history. That is a description of what the Holy Spirit does with a line when nobody is guarding it.

And you are already inside the answer to that prayer, which is a strange thing to be and a true one. The word says He asked that they would all be one so the world would believe, and the Holy Spirit has been carrying that request up and down your road since long before there were two roofs on it.