The Place I Set For Everybody Else

There is a chair at the end of that table that does not belong to anybody.

That is deliberate. It has been deliberate for twenty years. His mother did it and her mother did it before her, and the rule in that house has never been written down anywhere, but everybody who has ever eaten there knows it: you lay one more than you have counted.

Somebody might come. Somebody usually does.

He could give you a list. The man from two streets over whose wife had gone into hospital and who did not want to be in his own kitchen. The two students who had nowhere on a Thursday. The nephew who came for a week in a bad year and stayed four months. The woman from the shop who has been coming on the first Friday of the month for six years now and has never once been asked why.

He is not proud of this and he would be embarrassed if you said it out loud. It is not a ministry. It is a plate.

And on Tuesday night, after everybody had gone, he was carrying the last of it in and he stopped in the doorway with a dish in each hand, because a thought had arrived that he did not know what to do with.

The thought was: I have set that place for two hundred people.

And I have never once set it for Him.

He does not mean God, exactly. He would say he has prayed at that table every week of his life. He means something more specific and much stranger, which is this: he has spent twenty years learning that a person is welcome when there is a place laid before they arrive, and in all of that time it has never crossed his mind that the Holy Spirit is somebody a place could be laid for.

He was taught what the Spirit does. He could tell you. He has heard it explained well.

Nobody ever put Him at a table.

And that is you in your own doorway with a dish in each hand, or you would not still be reading a piece about a chair.

The word for somebody who has moved in

Let me take you to the night Jesus said the thing that settles this, because He said it to men who were about to lose everything and He chose His words carefully.

He tells them He is going. And then, before they can get frightened properly, He tells them what is coming instead.

Even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.John 14:17

Read the verbs slowly, because they are all household verbs.

Dwells. Will be in you. Not visits. Not comes upon when required. Not is dispatched. Dwells is what a person does in a house they live in, and there is no version of that word that means standing by outside.

You are not hosting a guest who might come. You have Somebody living in the house. It is written that He dwells with you and will be in you (John 14:17), and dwells is a word about residence and not about a call-out. The Holy Spirit is the One that sentence is about, and He has been in that kitchen every Tuesday for twenty years.

Now here is the thing I want to be careful about, because a man like you will hear it wrong if I am not.

I am not telling you that you have been rude. Nobody in this is being told off. You did not fail to lay a place for Him out of coldness. You did not lay one because nobody ever told you He was somebody a place could be laid for, and a man cannot be blamed for not doing a thing he was never shown.

You have not been neglecting Him and He has not been standing outside the door waiting to be asked in. It is written that the Holy Spirit was given to us, and that the love of God has been poured into our hearts through Him (Romans 5:5), which is a past tense about something already done. The Holy Spirit came in without being invited to the table, because He was never a guest.

And that is the part that turns it round, and it turns it round in your favor.

The place you have been leaving empty at the end of that table is a picture of something. All those years you have been saying, with a plate and a fork and no words at all: there is room here for somebody I have not counted.

He is the somebody you did not count.

You are not the host in this house and you never were. It is written that Jesus asked the Father, and the Father gave another Helper to be with you forever (John 14:16), and forever is longer than the twenty years and longer than the house. The Holy Spirit has been the settled one at that table the whole time, and you have been the one carrying dishes.

Let me say one more thing, and then we will stop.

There is nothing here you have to feel. That matters, because a man who is practical and busy hears an article like this and starts wondering whether he is supposed to sense something now, and whether it means anything that he does not.

You are not required to produce an experience for any of this to be true. It is written that the Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God (Romans 8:16), and the witnessing is His work rather than a feeling you generate. The Holy Spirit does that whether the kitchen is loud or quiet and whether you notice or not.