The Quiet Ones Are In The List

She is not shy. That is the first thing to say, because people assume it and it is wrong.

She runs a department. She has fired people. She will say a hard true thing across a table to somebody senior without her voice changing, and she has done it more than once.

She is simply not loud, and she has never in her life been the sort of person who cries in a room.

And over about nine years she has come to a conclusion that she has never said to anybody, which is that this whole business of being poured out on belongs to a different kind of person than her.

She has watched. That is the thing. She has watched carefully and honestly for nine years, and the pattern she has observed is real: it is the demonstrative ones. The ones with their hands up first. The ones who weep. The ones who are already halfway to the front when the invitation is given, who feel things visibly and loudly and immediately.

And she looks at them without one ounce of contempt, and thinks: I am not built like that.

So she stands where she stands, and she is glad for them, and something in her has quietly filed itself out.

Now let me put her down and ask you the question.

Have you decided God only lands on people louder than you?

He went past three enormous things on purpose

There is a scene on a mountain that I think about constantly, and it is not usually preached the way it actually reads.

Elijah has collapsed. He has just had the most spectacular public day of his life and it has emptied him, and he is under a tree asking to die, and God feeds him and walks him to a mountain and tells him to stand there.

And then three things happen, and each one is exactly the sort of thing you would expect God to arrive in.

Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.1 Kings 19:11 and 12

Wind. Earthquake. Fire. Three registers of enormous, three things a man would write home about, and the text says three times, flatly, almost stubbornly: not there, not there, not there.

And then a sound so small that most translations reach for a paradox to carry it. A gentle whisper. A still small voice. The sound of a thin silence, if you want it word for word.

Now understand what that passage is actually doing, because it is not saying loud is bad. God does the wind and the earthquake and the fire; He is not embarrassed by any of them, and on other days He has been in all three.

It is saying the register is not the evidence.

And that is the exact thing you have been getting wrong for nine years. You have been reading volume as a receipt.

So hear what is true about you tonight. You are not on the outside of anything. Scripture says the Spirit was poured out on all people, and the Holy Spirit who arrived on that mountain in a whisper is entirely capable of arriving in a woman who does not cry in rooms, and He has not once required a person to perform an arrival in order to have one.

Let me say the harder half of that, gently, because you deserve the whole truth.

Some of what you have observed is real. Some rooms do teach, without meaning to, that receiving looks like one thing. Nobody announced that. It settled. And you, being an honest woman who watches carefully, drew the obvious conclusion from the available evidence and quietly stepped out of the queue.

You were not being falsely modest. You were being observant, and you were observing the wrong thing.

The room this house is named for, in a stable in Los Angeles in 1906, was famously loud, and the newspapers loved that part. But the witnesses kept trying to tell people that the noise was not the point. It was who was in the room. And in that room, on those planks, were a great many people who never made a sound at all, and nobody ever wrote about them, and the Spirit fell on them exactly the same.

But you are not on the outside of anything. Elijah had just had the loudest public day of his life and it had emptied him, and 1 Kings 19 puts the arrival at the exact point where he had nothing left to perform with, and the Holy Spirit is entirely able to reach a woman who does not cry in rooms.