Nobody Told Me He Was Company

She can still describe the room.

Blue plastic stacking chairs, the kind that link together with little hooks and never quite line up. A whiteboard with a diagram on it. A window at the back too high to see out of, and a radiator under it that ticked, and eleven of them in a semicircle on a Wednesday evening for six weeks.

She was nineteen. She loved it. That is the part people expect her to walk back and she will not, because the man teaching it was kind and prepared and had thought carefully about every session, and she still has the notebook.

The subject was the Holy Spirit.

And what she came away with, over six Wednesdays, was a working understanding of what the Holy Spirit does. Conviction. Guidance. Gifts. Power for witness. There was a whole evening on power. She wrote the word down and underlined it twice, because that is what nineteen year olds do with the word power.

Nobody said He was good company.

She has thought about that a great deal since, and she wants to be fair about it. Nobody withheld it. It was not a conspiracy. It was simply that the language they had was the language of what He does, and a person can spend twenty years being taught the functions of somebody and never once be told what they are like to be in a room with.

So here is what happened to her, and it is not dramatic and it does not have a moment in it.

She is thirty-six now. She lives alone, which is not tragic and mostly she likes it. And there is an hour in the evenings, usually between the washing up and the point where she puts something on, that has a particular quality she has never found words for. Not sad exactly. Just very quiet, in a way that she notices in her ribs.

And she would pray in that hour, sometimes. Properly. She was taught well and she prays well.

But she was praying the way you use a phone. Reaching for power, asking for help, asking for guidance, and then putting it down and getting on.

And one evening, standing at the sink with her hands in the water and nothing on, she caught herself thinking a sentence that stopped her, which was: I wonder if He minds being used like that.

Which is a strange thing to wonder about a force.

You do not wonder whether electricity minds.

The word Jesus chose, on the worst night of their lives

The night before He was arrested, with eleven frightened men round a table who were about to lose the only thing holding their lives together, Jesus tells them what is going to happen next.

He does not say: I am leaving you power. He does not say: I am leaving you an anointing, a resource, an enabling.

And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever.John 14:16

Another.

That is the word to stand on. Another one like the one you already have. They had spent three years with a Person who ate with them, walked ahead of them on roads, asked them questions, slept in a boat, was pleased with them, was sad in front of them. And Jesus, on the worst night of their lives, comforts them by telling them that what is coming next is another one of Him.

Not a substitute service. Not a downgrade. Company.

You have been given another of the same kind, and Jesus chose that word on the worst night of their lives. It is written that the Father gives another Helper, to be with you forever (John 14:16), where another means one more like the one already known. The Holy Spirit came to you as a Person and not as a supply.

And then He says one more thing about it that I want you to hear as it is:

You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.John 14:17

Dwells. That is not a word for a resource. Nobody says a battery dwells. Dwells means lives in, stays, has moved in and unpacked and is not on standby somewhere waiting to be called down.

You have Somebody living in you rather than a resource waiting on standby. It is written, you know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you (John 14:17), and dwells is a word about a house. The Holy Spirit has been unpacked in you the whole time you were reaching past Him.

So here is the whole message, and it is small enough to carry.

You were taught, carefully and truthfully, what He does. Nothing you were taught was wrong. It was just the smaller half, and the half you were not given is the one that answers the hour between the washing up and the television.

He is a Person. He is with you. He is not a current you switch on when you are running low, and He does not arrive when you get the wording right and leave when you have had a bad week, and He is not somewhere else at the moment.

He is company. He has been company all along, in the quiet hour, in your ribs, while you were reaching past Him for something He was already being.

You are not alone in the hour between the washing up and the television. It is written that God's Spirit dwells in you and that you are God's temple (1 Corinthians 3:16), which puts a Person at an address and not an energy in a socket. The Holy Spirit has been in that quiet hour every night of it.

And I am not going to ask you to feel Him. That is the other thing that has probably been done to you and I am not doing it. There is no experience you have to produce here and there is nothing you have missed by not having had one. A friend sitting in a room with you does not become more present because you got emotional about it.

You have His company tonight whether anything rises in you or nothing does. It is written that the Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God (Romans 8:16), a witness that does not run through your feelings about it. The Holy Spirit is in the room already and was before you sat down.