The Room Waiting for Him

There are eleven people in a living room and four of them are sitting on chairs carried in from the kitchen.

Tuesday, seven thirty, at the Petersons' house, the way it has been for as long as anybody can remember. A plate of store cookies on the coffee table that nobody has touched since eight. Two lamps on, the overhead off, because Marlene says the overhead makes it feel like a meeting. Bibles open on knees. Somebody's reading glasses on the arm of the couch.

Ken has been coming for six years. He sits in the same place, the end of the couch by the lamp, because from there he can see everybody and nobody has to turn to see him. He has read every chapter they have gone through. He brings the folding chairs up from the basement before anybody arrives and takes them back down after. He is not a visitor.

At eight forty Gary closes his Bible and does the thing he does, which is look around the ring with real warmth and say, Ken, would you close us tonight?

And the room goes quiet in the particular way a room goes quiet when it has handed something over.

Ken hears the refrigerator start up in the kitchen. He hears somebody's chair creak. Two people have already bowed their heads, which somehow makes it worse, because now there is nothing to look at. His mouth has gone completely dry. He gets out the word Lord, and then there is nothing behind it, nothing at all, the way a faucet runs air when the water has been shut off at the street.

Four seconds. Maybe five. Then Marlene, who is kind, says, I will start us off, and prays a lovely prayer, and everybody says amen and reaches for their coats.

Ken carries the chairs down to the basement. In the car he does not turn the radio on. What he is thinking, all the way home, is not about tonight. It is: six years. Six years, and I could not get one sentence out. Everybody in that room can do it. So what have I actually been doing on that couch.

You know the silence. Yours might be a table with your wife's family around it, or a hospital hallway with your sister looking at you, or the moment somebody says would you pray for me and means right now. And you know the thing that gets said afterward, in the car, in your own voice, about what the silence proved.

Written for the man who cannot get the first word out

Let me put something in front of you before I say one thing about growing.

There is a sentence in Paul's letter to Rome that was written down, kept, copied, carried across the world and printed in the book on your knee for the express purpose of meeting a man in the four seconds after somebody says, would you close us tonight.

Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.Romans 8:26

Read the middle of it slowly. We know not what we should pray for as we ought. That is not a warning about weak Christians. That is Paul, writing about himself and every believer he knows, stating as ordinary fact that we do not have the words. The verse does not treat the shortage as a scandal. It treats it as the given, and then names the One who covers it.

You have a Helper who takes over at the exact point where the words stop, and you have Him named in writing so that nobody could tell you otherwise. Romans 8:26 puts it plainly, that the Spirit Himself makes intercession with groanings which cannot be uttered, and He was already doing it in that living room while the refrigerator was running.

In the country my family comes from, a man traveling into a place whose language he does not speak brings someone with him who does. He does not stay home. He does not learn the whole language first. He goes, and he brings the one who can speak, and the business gets done. Nobody in that market thinks less of the traveler. The interpreter is not evidence of his failure. The interpreter is evidence that he was expected.

You were carried through those four seconds and you were not carried out of pity. The next verse says He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, Romans 8:27, because the Spirit makes intercession according to the will of God, and that is not an emergency measure for the inarticulate. It is how prayer has always worked.

Nobody digs up an olive tree in its sixth year

Now let me deal with the number, because the number is what was doing the damage on the drive home.

An olive tree in its sixth year looks like almost nothing. It is a stick with leaves. It will not give you a real crop for a decade, and the trees that feed a family for two hundred years all went through that stick stage, and no one who has ever farmed one has stood in front of it in year six with a spade, calculating.

Jesus told it as a parable, and the part everybody skips is the part that matters here.

And should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how. For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear.Mark 4:27-28

He knoweth not how. The man in the parable cannot see it happening. He is not given a way to check. He sleeps and rises, sleeps and rises, and the growth is real the entire time and completely invisible to him, and the Lord tells it that way on purpose.

You have been growing through all six of those years, and it is written that the man in the field is not the one who can see it happening. Mark 4:27 says he knows not how, and the Spirit is the one doing the work under the ground while a man carries folding chairs up from a basement on a Tuesday.

And look at what was actually in those six years. Every chapter read. The chairs. The Tuesdays in February when it would have been easier not to go. A man does not do that for six years by accident, and no shortage of words at eight forty undoes one hour of it.

You are fed, and you were fed on every one of those evenings when you said nothing at all. It is written that the newborn desires the sincere milk of the word and grows by it, 1 Peter 2:2, and the Spirit feeds a man through his ears long before He ever asks anything of his mouth.

Three words, and the hand came out

Here is the other thing I want you to have, and it is very short.

There is a man in Luke 18 who would not lift his eyes and who prayed exactly seven words: God be merciful to me a sinner. Luke 18:13. Jesus said that man went home justified, and He said it in contrast to a fluent, well constructed prayer offered a few feet away by somebody who could definitely have closed a Bible study.

And there is Peter, out on the water, going under, and what he got out was three words. Lord, save me. Matthew 14:30. The next line says immediately Jesus stretched forth His hand and caught him. Not after. Immediately. Three words, and the hand came out.

You have a prayer that Scripture has already commended, and it is three words long. Matthew 14:30 records the shortest prayer in the Gospels and the answer that came before the sentence was finished, and the Spirit who bears witness with a man's own spirit is not measuring syllables on the way past.

I want to say the next part carefully, because there is a lie living in that living room and it wears a friendly face. The lie says fluency is the fruit. It is not. Some of the people in that ring pray beautifully because they grew up in homes where people prayed out loud at dinner, which is a gift and not an achievement. Some of them are quicker with words than you are, in every setting, about everything.

You are heard at whatever length you can manage, and you were heard the very first time you tried it. Luke 18:13 is seven words long and the Lord Himself commended it, and it is His Spirit, not the shape of the sentence, that carries a man's words up.