He Was Still In The Kitchen

Onions.

Onions in cheap oil, going soft in a pan, in a kitchen with the window shut. That smell gets into the tea towels and the hallway and it is still faintly there the next morning, and for the rest of your life it will mean the ordinary middle of an ordinary week.

That is what your house smelled of about forty minutes after it happened.

Because that is what a person does. Whatever it was, and I am not asking, it happened, and there was that awful hollow quiet afterwards, and then somebody needed feeding, and you stood at the counter and chopped an onion and put it in a pan, and the smell filled the house the way it always does.

And somewhere in the middle of the chopping you had a thought that was not loud and did not feel like a decision.

Well. He has gone quiet now.

Not gone. You would not have said gone. You would have said something more reasonable, about grieving Him, about not presuming, about giving it a bit of time before you come back to Him properly, and every one of those sentences sounded humble as you thought it.

But watch what your body did over the next few days, because your body always tells the truth.

You stopped talking to Him in the car.

You still prayed at the table with the family, out loud, the ordinary words. You still put music on. But that running conversation, the one that goes on under everything, the one that says look at that and did you see her face and I do not know what to do about Thursday, that stopped, and it stopped without any announcement.

You have been sharing a house with Him for years the way you share a house with someone you love, half your sentences unfinished because they already know.

And this week you have been polite with Him.

You have moved through your own kitchen like a guest. Careful. Formal. Waiting for something to be sorted out before you can be at home again.

And there was no announcement from His end either. That is the whole of it. Nobody said anything to you. You worked it out yourself, on a Tuesday, over a pan of onions, and you have been living by that conclusion ever since.

Nobody moved

I want to give you one sentence tonight, and I am not going to dress it up or hedge it or put anything on the end of it.

He did not leave.

Now here is where that comes from, and notice who is speaking and how the writer uses it.

for he has said, "I will never leave you nor forsake you." So we can confidently say, "The Lord is my helper; I will not fear."Hebrews 13:5-6

He has said. Past tense, already spoken, on the record, settled.

That is not a promise about your good weeks. There is no clause in it. It does not read never leave you unless, and it does not read never forsake you as long as, and the writer does not attach one single condition to it before he draws his conclusion from it. He just goes straight to therefore we can say it with confidence.

You have a sentence spoken over you already, on the record and settled, with no clause hanging off it. It is written, for He has said, I will never leave you nor forsake you (Hebrews 13:5), in the past tense, as something already out of His mouth. The Holy Spirit did not step out of that kitchen while you chopped onions.

And the reason that matters so much for you tonight is that you have been carrying an idea about God that He has never once said about Himself.

The idea is that His presence is a response. That it comes in when you are doing well and eases off when you are not, like weather following a mood, and that the way to get it back is to be all right again for long enough.

Beloved, that is not the God of that verse and it is not the God of the New Testament.

The Holy Spirit is not visiting you. He is not a guest who comes when the house is tidy. He came to dwell, which is a word about living somewhere, and He came into the middle of a group of people who had spectacularly let their Lord down within living memory, and none of them had earned the room He moved into.

You are dwelt in rather than visited, and you did not earn the room any more than they did. It is written, do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you (1 Corinthians 3:16), where dwells is a word about residence and not about calling in. The Holy Spirit moved into a house nobody tidied first.

So let me say the plain thing again, and then I am going to say it a third time, because you have been arguing with it for eight days.

He was still in the kitchen.

The whole time. While you were chopping. While you were deciding He had gone quiet. While you were being careful with Him in your own house and calling it reverence.

You have had company for eight days that you have been treating as an absence. It is written that He has given us of His Spirit, and by this we know that we abide in Him and He in us (1 John 4:13), with the evidence sitting in a giving God did rather than in what you noticed. The Holy Spirit was at the counter for every one of those eight days.

He did not step back, and He is not standing in the hall waiting for you to sort yourself out, and He has not been holding anything against you while you got on with the week.

He is here now, in the same room, and you are not cast off.