The Flat Is Not Right

Four years he has wanted to have two people round, and four years he has not.

He can give you the reasons and they are all true.

There is a damp patch on the wall by the window and it has been looked at twice and it comes back. The lift has been out since April and it is four floors. There are three chairs and one of them is the one from the bedroom. The kitchen is a corridor. You can hear the family upstairs.

None of that is invented. A person coming to that flat would notice every one of those things.

Here is the part that got him in February, standing in the middle of it with the kettle going.

He knows the two men he wants to ask. He has known them both for years. One of them lived in a hostel for eleven months and does not talk about it much. The other has six people in a three bedroom house and comes to work every day looking like he has not sat down.

Neither of them is going to say a word about a damp patch.

He knows that. He has always known it. It has made not one bit of difference in four years, because the reasons were never about them, and he worked that out at last while a kettle boiled and then did nothing about it until now.

Come into my house, and abide there

Sit down on the chair from the bedroom a minute, because there is a woman in Acts who asks two traveling men into her house, and what she says is worth reading word for word.

And when she was baptized, and her household, she besought us, saying, If ye have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come into my house, and abide there. And she constrained us.Acts 16:15

If ye have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come into my house.

She says one thing about herself and nothing whatsoever about the house.

Not its size, not its condition, not an apology, not a warning about anything. The house is named once, as the place she lives, and the whole weight of the invitation sits on a question about her and the Lord.

And then: she constrained us. She pressed. They were not immediately going to come and she did not take that as a verdict on her house.

Hear this in your own flat. There is nothing here that disqualifies you, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture has her name the house once and describe it never, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been keeping two men in your mind for four years.

Now let me be careful, because there are two ways to get this wrong and this site will not do either.

Nothing in this article is against a Sunday gathering. A building full of people singing is not a lesser thing than a table with three chairs at it, and if the best hours of your week happen in a hall on a Sunday morning then that is a gift and it does not need defending against anybody.

And nothing here is aimed at a reader who has nowhere. If you have no place of your own, or a room in somebody else's house, or a situation you cannot invite anybody into at all, then this article is not a rebuke and you are not behind, because nothing written anywhere makes a lease the condition of anything, and the Holy Spirit is not measuring anybody by a front door.

The only thing being said is to you, the man with a flat and a damp patch and four years of wanting to.

Now let me name what the reasons are actually doing, because they are all true and being true is exactly what makes them work.

They are a pre emptive explanation.

You have run the visit in your head and you have got to the part where somebody looks at the wall, and you have written the sentence you would say. Yes, sorry, they have been at it twice. And you have heard yourself saying it, and something in you does not want to say it, and the whole four years lives in that one imagined sentence.

Hear this too, and let it land by the window. You are not hiding anything from anybody, and Scripture is what says so. What is written puts the invitation on her standing with the Lord and not on the state of her walls, and the Spirit of God has never once made a room a condition of anything.

And the two men. Think about who you chose.

One of them has been in a hostel and one of them has six people in a three bedroom house. You did not pick two men who would inspect a flat. You picked two men who would sit down in it, and you picked them years ago, and you have known the whole time exactly how it would actually go. The written word never described her house once, and the Holy Spirit has held those two names in front of you for four years.