I want to ask you a question and then I want to leave a bit of space after it, because the answer takes a second to arrive.
How many people came to your house last year?
Now think about how many days you closed that door.
The arithmetic does not work, does it. The door is closed on Tuesday afternoon in February when nobody has been to that house since Christmas and nobody is coming until spring.
So it is not for them.
I want to say this next part carefully because I know it is going to land somewhere tender. That door is mostly shut against you. Not against visitors. Against the woman who lives here, who is not allowed to see what is in that room either, and who has been walking a narrow route through her own home for a long time without ever calling it what it is.
And I am not saying that to make you feel worse. I am saying it because being shut out of your own house is a different problem than being embarrassed in front of guests, and the second one has been getting all the attention.
Whither shall I go from thy spirit
There is a psalm that people usually read as a comfort about God being everywhere, and it is that, and it is also a psalm about a person who has been trying to get away from something.
Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. (Psalm 139:7 and 8, King James Version)
Read the verbs. Go. Flee. Ascend. Make my bed.
This is a person moving. Not a person sitting still being reassured. And the conclusion he keeps arriving at is that there is nowhere in the whole of creation that is outside the reach of the Spirit of God, and by the end of the psalm he has stopped running and started asking to be searched.
Now hold that beside your hallway. You have a house with a room in it that you have made unreachable. Not to God. To you. And the whole architecture of your week has been arranged around not going there.
You are not able to be anywhere in this house where the Spirit of God is not already, and Psalm 139:7 has never once found a room outside His reach. It is written that there is no fleeing from His presence in any direction at all, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a comfort rather than a threat for somebody who has been avoiding a room.
You have been shut out of a room in a house that has your name on it. The word describes a presence that fills every place a person could go, and the Spirit of God is the one who has been in that room the entire time it was closed to you.
A house you are not allowed in is not a home yet
Let me put a name to what this has cost, because I think it has never been added up.
A room has been lost. That is the small part.
The large part is a woman living as a guest in her own home. There are places she goes and places she does not, and the places she does not are decided by something other than her, and the adapting went so deep that it stopped feeling like anything at all. A house is a record of what a season cost, and it is not a verdict on the person who lives in it.
A person can carry that for years. But it wears at a thing underneath, which is the plain sense that this is your house and you are the one who lives here.
You were never a visitor here, and a shut door has never once had the authority to make you one in your own home. Psalm 139:7 puts the presence of God in every place a person could possibly be, and the Spirit of God is the one who restores to somebody the plain fact that they belong where they live.
So tonight is a small act of ownership, and it is not about cleaning at all.
You are permitted to walk into any room in this house tonight because it is your house, and that has never once depended on the state of the room. It is written that even the darkest place a person could go is not dark to Him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who walks in ahead of somebody who has not been in there for two years.
Two minutes, as the person who lives here
So here is the whole of what I am asking, and the framing is the medicine.
Open the door. Put the light on. Stand there for two minutes.
Do not stand there as somebody inspecting a problem. Stand there as the person who lives in this house, looking at one of her own rooms.
Touch nothing. Move nothing. That room is owed no work tonight, and nobody is there to assess it.
Then close the door and stop.
You are able to stand in a room of your own tonight, and standing there has never once required you to earn the right first. Psalm 139:7 finds God present in every place a person can go, and the Spirit of God is present with somebody who is simply standing in her own back bedroom.
So here is what I believe is going out tonight over somebody living in part of their own home.
You are not a guest here, and four years of walking a narrow route through your own house has never once made you one. I am not promising you the room comes back quickly and I am not promising you a finished house. Psalm 139:7 puts God in every place a person can go and never once shames the one who was trying to get away, and it is the Holy Spirit, not my saying so, who takes that and stands it between you and the voice that has been treating you like a visitor in your own hallway.
And this, which is the word I came with:
You have every room in this house tonight, and the state of any of them has never once altered whose house it is. The written word says there is nowhere to flee from His presence and no darkness that is dark to Him, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that true and ordinary in a back bedroom at nine in the evening.
Open it. Stand there as the owner. Two minutes. Then close it.
Declare this over yourself
- Door I thought was for visitors, I am opening you tonight, and I am allowed to be in my own house. Psalm 139:7 says there is nowhere to flee from His presence, so by the Holy Spirit I stand in that room for two minutes in the name of Jesus.
- Habit that made me a guest here, you are not in this text. The written word finds His presence in every place a person could go, and by the Holy Spirit I am finished walking a narrow path through a house with my name on it.
- Lord, You are the one from whom there is nowhere to flee. Your word says the darkness is not dark to You, so by Your Spirit I open that door tonight as the woman who lives here, and I close it, and I stop.
Psalm 139:7
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