They Think I Carry The Room

They put her on last for a reason and everybody knows the reason.

She has led that room for nine years. When she sings, something happens in it, and she is not being falsely modest about this, because pretending she cannot see it would be its own kind of lie. People stay behind. People find things out about themselves. A man who had not spoken to his daughter in six years drove to Coventry the next morning.

That is real, and it is still happening, and it happened three weeks ago.

And she has not felt one thing since February.

Not on a platform, not in a car, not in the kitchen at half past six in the morning, which used to be where most of it happened. She stands up there and does what she has always done and the room fills, and she is in the middle of it dry as a stone, and then she goes home and sits in her own kitchen and there is nothing there at all.

She has worked out an explanation and it is worse than anything anybody could say to her.

She thinks He stayed with the room.

She thinks she is a fitting that still functions. She thinks the anointing on that meeting is a real thing that God is doing for those people, and that she is the pipe it comes through, and that a pipe does not have to be anything for the water to be real. And that at some point in February He stopped being with her and went on being with it.

She cannot say this to anyone. Every person she would say it to is somebody who was in that room, and she can see exactly what it would do to them.

And that is you after your own Sunday, or you would not still be reading.

What God does when you cannot hold your end

Here is a line that gets quoted at people as a warning and is not one. It is one of the flattest, kindest sentences Paul ever wrote and I want you to read it as the promise it is.

If we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself.2 Timothy 2:13

If we are faithless. Not if we are wicked, not if we walk out. Faithless: empty of faith, without the thing that is supposed to be there. Which is a precise description of a woman standing on a platform in the middle of a full room with nothing in her.

He remains faithful. And then the reason, which is the part that ends the argument. For He cannot deny Himself.

His staying is not a response to your condition. It is a property of His nature. He would have to stop being who He is in order to leave you, and that is the only reason Paul gives, because it is the only one that holds when the person is empty.

You are held by Somebody whose staying is a fact about Him and not a response to you. It is written that if we are faithless, He remains faithful, for He cannot deny Himself (2 Timothy 2:13). The Holy Spirit has been with a woman standing dry in the middle of a full room since February.

Now the split you have constructed, because it is clever and it is wrong at the joint.

You divided the presence into two: the thing that visits a meeting, and the thing that is with a person. And you assigned yourself the first and mourned the second. But the promise in Scripture is never made to rooms. It is made to people. Rooms do not get sealed, rooms are not indwelt, rooms are not addressed as temples. Every one of those words has a person on the other end of it, and He does not run a supply line through somebody He has left.

You are indwelt, and the meeting is not the tenant. 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), addressed to people and never to buildings. The Holy Spirit is in the woman in the kitchen at half past six with nothing happening.

And now the plain one, and nothing follows it.

He is with you tonight. Not with the platform, not with the room, not with a gift that outlived its owner. With you, in your kitchen, in the dry.

You are not a fitting that still functions, and you are not cast off. It is written that He has said, I will never leave you nor forsake you (Hebrews 13:5), and never has no version of itself in which He stays for a crowd and leaves the woman leading it. The Holy Spirit did not go on being with it and stop being with you.