I Have Introduced Him A Thousand Times

She has a sentence she uses and she is not proud of having a sentence, but she has one.

She says: let us just make room for Him.

She has said it in that building for eleven years. She has said it into a microphone with four hundred people in front of her and she has said it in a side room with nine, and she means it every time, and it works, in the sense that things happen and people are met and she has stood at the back afterwards while somebody told her something they had not told anybody.

She is not a fraud. Nothing in this is going to suggest she is.

And on Thursday she was stacking the chairs after a morning thing, on her own, and she found herself thinking about the phrase she uses, and she thought: I have been introducing people to Him for eleven years.

And she stopped with a chair in her hands, because the next thought came in behind it before she could stop it.

Nobody ever introduced Him to me.

She learned to lead. That is the honest shape of it. She was young and capable and somebody put her at the front early, and what she was given was a competence: how to read a room, when to let a silence run, what not to say. She was taught how to bring other people to Him.

She was never brought.

And what makes it hard to say out loud, and it is the reason she has not said it out loud, is that it sounds like a complaint about people who were kind to her. It is not. Nobody withheld anything. They gave her what they had, which was a way of doing it, and nobody noticed that a person can hold the door open for eleven years and never once walk through it themselves.

And that is you with a chair in your hands, or you would not have read this far.

Paul had a word for the thing you have been handing out

Here is a sentence you have probably read at the end of a service a hundred times and never once heard as addressed to you.

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.2 Corinthians 13:14

Fellowship.

It is a word for two people in company. It means shared life, going halves, being in on something together. It is the word used for partners in a fishing business and for friends who eat together, and Paul is using it about the third Person of the Trinity as though that were the most ordinary arrangement in the world.

Not the power of the Holy Spirit. Not the gifts of the Holy Spirit. The fellowship of Him.

You are inside an offer of company and it was made to you as directly as it was made to anybody you have ever led. It is written that the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all (2 Corinthians 13:14), and all does not have an exemption in it for the woman holding the microphone. The Holy Spirit is the One that fellowship belongs to, and it has been extended to you every time you extended it to a room.

Now let me name the thing you are actually afraid of.

You are afraid that eleven years of doing it for other people has made you unable to receive it yourself. That you have worn a groove and the groove only goes one way.

You are not disqualified by the years and the door has never once been shut in your direction. It is written that if anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink (John 7:37), and the words in that invitation are anyone and come, with no clause about who is currently running the room. The Holy Spirit is who Jesus was speaking about two verses later, and He was not describing a supply that only flows outward through a person.

And here is the thing about your sentence, which is the kindest turn in this whole message.

Let us make room for Him.

You have been saying, out loud, in public, for eleven years, the exact sentence you needed somebody to say to you. You have been holding a door open and describing what is on the other side, accurately, in your own words, in front of hundreds of people.

You already know the way. Nobody has to teach you anything.

You have the words for this already and you have had them the whole time. It is written that the Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God (Romans 8:16), so the recognition running in you when you stand at the front is His work and not a professional skill. The Holy Spirit has been doing that in you on every one of those mornings.

You are not learning something new today. You are turning round in a doorway you have been standing in for eleven years.