The Guest Who Sat Down

You have been carrying dishes in that house for nineteen years.

You know where the second set of glasses is kept. You know which chair has the wobble and you know that the small one at the end is for whoever arrives late. You have put children to bed in that house and taken people home from it and swept its floor after weddings.

And every single time somebody at that table says the word family, some small part of you does a check.

Not a painful check. Nothing dramatic. Just a quick internal confirmation that they probably mean it in the wide sense, and that the wide sense certainly includes you, and that it would be strange to ask.

You have never sat down first. Have you noticed that? Nineteen years and you have never once been in a chair before the family were in theirs.

Let me say something before we go on.

I am not correcting you.

There is nothing false about how you have been in that house. Every dish you carried was carried gladly and nobody was managing anybody. And I am not going to tell you that you have been standing outside something out of pride, because you have not.

I am saying I noticed you never sit down first. That is all.

No more strangers

Here is the sentence, and it moves a person twice in one line.

Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God.Ephesians 2:19

Read the two negatives first, because Paul puts them there deliberately.

No more strangers. A stranger is somebody with no claim, who is welcome only as long as he is welcomed.

No more foreigners. That is stronger. A foreigner in that world could live somewhere for decades, contribute, be liked, and still have no standing. He was a resident. He was not a member.

And then Paul goes past citizenship, which would have been enough, into the household of God, which is a family word and not a civic one.

So the sentence moves you from the doorway to the citizenship to the table, in one breath, and it does it with therefore, which means all of this rests on something already accomplished rather than on something being offered.

So I want to turn now and speak this over you, with the lamps just lit and the table filling.

You are of the household. Not one day, not when somebody says it out loud to you, not once the nineteen years become thirty. Right now, with a dish in your hands and the chairs going back, you are what that verse calls a fellowcitizen and a member of the house, and it is stated as an accomplished change rather than as an invitation on the table. That is not my kindness. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who sets a written line down in a real man in a real courtyard.

Now, I want to say something about the crossing, because I think you have been waiting for it in a particular form.

There has been a waiting in you for somebody to say it. For a moment at that table where the head of the family says something out loud that settles it publicly, and everybody hears, and after that it would be certain.

That moment may never come. Not because anybody withholds it. Because families do not usually do that, and the people at that table almost certainly assume it was settled years ago and would be startled to learn that anybody was waiting.

And here is the part that matters: the crossing does not need that moment. It can happen on an ordinary evening, quietly, while the lamps are being lit, and nobody at the table needs to notice.

And this next part is settled rather than pending, so hear it. You have a place that was not extended to you tonight, it was established by something already finished. The word says no more, twice, and no more is a phrase about a change that has already occurred, and it is His Spirit who carries a written line into a real house at a real hour of the evening.

Sit down first tonight. That is all the crossing has to look like.