Nobody has ever asked her to speak.
Twenty-two years in that building and not once. Not a Sunday, not a midweek, not the women's thing at Easter. Nobody has been cruel about it. Nobody has ever said no, because nobody has ever had to say anything at all.
She is not bitter. Do not put that on her. But there is a small clean ache in her that comes up about twice a year, usually in the car park, and it says the same thing every time.
They do not think there is anything in me.
Now let me tell you what happens at her kitchen table.
Tuesday nights. It started with two women about eleven years ago and there are usually seven or eight now, sometimes eleven, and once, memorably, fifteen and somebody sitting on the worktop.
Three marriages have been put back together at that table. A girl of nineteen who was going to end it told the truth at that table for the first time, at about one in the morning, with everybody else gone home. Two people found God there. One man who had not been near a church in a decade came because his sister dragged him and sat there for four hours saying nothing and came back the next week.
And every Sunday she sits in the fourth row and thinks, quietly, twice a year, in the car park: nobody has ever asked me.
So let me ask you.
Where is the table you have been doing the work at while you waited to be asked?
Two tentmakers took the best preacher of the age home for dinner
Here is a scene in Acts that ought to be famous and somehow is not.
There is a man called Apollos, and Luke does not undersell him. Learned. Mighty in the Scriptures. Fervent in spirit. He comes to Ephesus and starts speaking boldly in the synagogue and everybody can hear immediately that this man is something.
And he has a gap in what he knows. A real one, an important one, about the whole matter this house is named for.
Now, who deals with it? Who has the standing to walk up to the most eloquent man in the city and tell him he is missing something?
When Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they invited him to their home and explained to him the way of God more adequately.Acts 18:26
Look at who is doing the correcting in that sentence. You have been doing that exact work at a kitchen table for eleven years, and the Holy Spirit never once needed a room with a microphone in it to do anything in anybody.
A married couple who made tents.
That is it. That is the whole résumé. They were not apostles. Neither of them ever held an office anybody recorded. They had a house and a trade and, at various points, a church that met in their front room because there was nowhere else.
They did not correct him from a platform, because they did not have one and were never given one. They took him home.
And the man they took home went on to become one of the great teachers of the early Church, and there is a whole strand of the New Testament that runs through a kitchen in Ephesus.
Now hear this, beloved, and hear it with your whole chest.
You are not waiting to begin. Scripture puts the correction of Apollos in a house and not in a hall, and the Spirit has never once needed a room with a microphone in it before He would do something in a person.
Eleven years. Three marriages. A girl of nineteen at one in the morning.
Say that out loud in the car park next time and see how the sentence about nobody asking you holds up beside it.
And I am going to say the sharp thing now, gently, because you would want me to.
The ache is real and it is allowed. Nobody is telling you to pretend it does not come up. But the ache has been telling you a lie about the shape of the work, and the lie is that the table is the waiting room and the platform is the thing.
It is the other way round. It has always been the other way round. The platform is a delivery method for something that was made somewhere else, and you have been in the room where it gets made for eleven years.
The fire this house is named for fell in a stable in 1906. Before that it had been falling for weeks in a front room on Bonnie Brae Street, in a house, with people packed on the floor and on the porch, until the porch gave way under the weight of them.
It started in a house. It always starts in a house.
So here is what changes and I want you standing up for it.
Stop waiting to be started.
You have not been in a waiting room. You have been doing it. The only thing missing is that nobody has handed you a name for it, and you have taken that absence as a verdict, and it is not a verdict, it is an oversight, and oversights are not the voice of God.
Acts 18 says Priscilla and Aquila took Apollos home and explained the way of God to him more adequately, and nobody had given them one thing. The Holy Spirit Himself fell first in a front room on a street until the porch gave way.
The invitation is not the start. The table is the start. You have been standing in it for eleven years.
Declare this over yourself
Say these where you can hear yourself. Know what holds them up. This authority is not yours by nature, it is Christ's, and in Christ it has been given to you, so you speak as one representing the King. And you speak under His will, never over it. However He answers, and in whatever way He comes, the outcome is His.
- Invitation, you are not the start of anything and you never have been. Acts 18 says two tentmakers took the greatest preacher of that city home and explained the way of God to him in their own house, and nobody had handed them a thing.
- Sentence I say in the car park twice a year, that they do not think there is anything in me, you have been reading an oversight as a verdict. In the name of Jesus I put you down, and the Spirit He poured out fell in a front room until the porch gave way.
- Lord, Acts 18 has two tentmakers taking the greatest preacher in that city home, and Your Spirit has never needed a microphone to do anything in anybody. I am doing on a Sunday what I already do on a Tuesday, and the table was the work the whole time.
Acts 18:26
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