I Thought You Needed Silence

There has not been a silent hour in that house since 1998, and he can prove it.

His mother-in-law has the back room and the television is on from about seven in the morning, not loud, just permanently. There are four of them, two still at home and one who moved back in March with a child who is two. The dog is elderly and vocal. The boiler makes a noise in the airing cupboard that two separate men have now failed to fix and both said was harmless.

He is not complaining. He would be offended if you thought he was. He wanted a full house and he got one and he would not give a single person in it back.

But there is a sentence he has been carrying since he was about twenty-five, and he cannot remember who first said it to him, and it has quietly cost him a lot.

Find a quiet place.

He was taught it as the way in. Get somewhere still, early, on your own, and that is where you meet with God. And every book, every conference, every man he respected said some version of the same thing, and none of them were being unkind, and all of them presumably had a room.

He does not have a room. He has never had a room. He tried the car for a while and somebody always needed the car.

And what he has concluded, over about twenty years, without ever putting it into words until last Thursday standing at the sink, is this: that part of it is for other people.

Not out of bitterness. He is not a bitter man. Just as a practical matter, the way you accept that some jobs need a workshop and you do not have one.

And on Thursday, with the television going and the two year old shouting about something in the hall and the boiler doing its thing, he thought: I have written myself out of this.

And that is you at your own sink, or you would not still be reading.

Where He arrived, and what it sounded like

I want to take you to the day the Holy Spirit was poured out, because of one detail in it that nobody ever points out to men like you.

They were not in a quiet place.

And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.Acts 2:2

Read the nouns. A sound. A house.

Not a hillside at dawn. Not a cell. Not a retreat center. A house, with a room full of people in it, in a city, at a festival, at nine o'clock in the morning with the streets outside already full enough that a crowd came running within minutes.

And the arrival is described as a sound that filled the house.

You are not excluded by your household and you never have been. It is written that the sound filled the entire house where they were sitting (Acts 2:2), and house is the word Luke chose. The Holy Spirit arrived into a full building, not into a silence, and He has been arriving into full buildings ever since.

Now here is the second half, and it is the part I most want you to have.

The advice was not wrong. I am not going to stand here and tell you that twenty years of good men were talking nonsense, because they were not, and the man who told you to find a quiet place was trying to give you something real.

You are not being told that the people who taught you were wrong, and there is nothing to be angry about. It is written that Jesus Himself would withdraw to desolate places and pray (Luke 5:16), so quiet is genuinely a good thing and it is in the book. The Holy Spirit is not divided against Himself and He does not have a preference between a hillside and a hallway.

What went wrong is smaller and more ordinary than anybody being wrong. A method got handed on until it started to sound like the door. And a method is not a door, and when a man cannot use the method he assumes the room beyond it is shut, and it is not, and nobody was there to tell him.

You have not been outside anything for twenty years. It is written that you are God's temple and God's Spirit dwells in you (1 Corinthians 3:16), and dwells in you moves at the speed you move, through the hall, past the boiler, into the kitchen. The Holy Spirit has been in that house since 1998 at exactly the volume of the house.

And there is one more thing, and it is about the noise itself.

You have been treating your household as the obstacle. It is not the obstacle. It is the building He filled.