What The Fire Was Lit For

She has a shoebox of lanyards.

That is not a criticism, it is just true, and she would laugh about it herself. Eleven or twelve of them, going soft at the folds, from conferences in three countries. She has been in the front row for most of her adult life. She has queued in car parks in the rain at seven in the morning to be near the front. She has been prayed for by people whose names would mean something to you, and she can tell you exactly what happened in her body on a Friday night in a leisure center in 2009, and she is not exaggerating, and something really did happen.

She has hunger. Nobody who has met her doubts it.

And she has a brother called Dean who lives eleven miles away and has not been in a church since their mother's funeral.

She prays for him. Every day, out loud, by name, and she has done it for eleven years. She has stood in meetings with her hands up and prayed for him. She has had people agree with her for him in three languages. She has come home from every single one of those nights with the same feeling in her chest, and if she is honest about what she was asking for in that feeling, it was not really Dean.

It was a demonstration.

Something undeniable. Something that would arrive in his life like a piece of weather and settle the whole thing without her having to drive eleven miles.

And here is the part she noticed on a Tuesday afternoon, standing at her own sink, holding a mug she was not washing.

She has never been round.

Eleven years. Not once for no reason. Christmas, twice, awkwardly, in and out in ninety minutes. She knows the exact shape of what she wants God to do for Dean and she does not know what color his back door is.

The mug is still in her hand. The water has gone cold. And a question arrives that she has never asked in her life, in all those front rows, in all that rain, and it is not an accusing question, it is almost gentle.

What did I think it was all for?

And now I am going to stop saying she.

Because you have hunger too. You would not be reading this if you did not. You have sought God for years and you have wanted the real thing and not the imitation, and you have been in rooms where something genuinely happened and you have never once been able to explain it properly to anybody afterwards.

And there is a person. There is always a person. And most of what you have asked for over them has been a request for a demonstration that would spare you the eleven miles.

He answered a different question than they asked

Before the teaching, hear where you stand. You are not a person short of anything. Acts 1 says you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and the Spirit has not once been given to a room and then held back from a person in it.

There is a morning in the first chapter of Acts where a group of people ask Jesus a question about timing, and He does not answer it. What He gives them instead is the sentence this whole family of ours has been built on, and it has a small word in the middle that gets swallowed every time.

But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you will be My witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.Acts 1:8

Power. And.

Not power, full stop. Not power, then we will see. The sentence does not stop to admire itself. The power arrives already going somewhere, and the place it is going is named in the same breath: you will be My witnesses.

And a witness is not a display. That is the whole thing, and it takes a second to land because we are so used to the word meaning a performance. A witness is a person who was there and says so. Somebody who saw it, who can be asked questions, who has an address. The power is not the evidence. You are the evidence, and the power is what makes you able to go and be it.

Now let me say something plainly about our own house, because it is ours and I can say it here, and it is said with love and not as an accusation.

We are the family that knows how to receive. Nobody receives like us. We will drive through the night for it. And the thing that catches us, over and over, is that receiving is so wonderful that it starts to look like the destination. So the experiences collect. The lanyards go soft in a shoebox. And a person can spend twenty years going deeper into a room that was only ever a door.

It was a door. The fire fell in a plain building nobody respected, on people who by every rule of that city should not have been sitting in the same room, and what everybody who walked past could not get over was not what happened in the meeting. It was who came out of the doors together afterwards, and where they went. The fire crossed a line, and then it crossed a street.

That is what it was lit for. Not to be felt. To be carried, out of the door, eleven miles, to one person with a name.

And here is where I have to be careful with you, because there is a lie waiting at this exact point and it wears a helpful face.

Going round to Dean's is not the technique that produces Dean's salvation. You cannot make that happen and you were never asked to. His heart is his own and it is God's, and it is not yours to command, and nothing in this message is telling you that the right action unlocks the right outcome, because that is a trade and this is not a trade.

You are not being handed a lever. You are being handed a purpose. What God does with Dean is His, entirely, and He is better at it than you are, and He loves him more than you do.

But the power in you was never for your own evidence. It was lit to send you somewhere. And there is a door eleven miles away that you have never knocked on, and you are the one who was given the fire.

And you have not been given something to store. The word puts the power and the witness in one sentence and joins them with a purpose, and the Spirit has never filled anybody as a destination.