The Back Of The Hall, Eleven Years Ago

The room he remembers is a hired hall with a curtain across the far end and a radiator that had been painted so many times the ridges had gone soft.

He was at the back. He had come because a man from work had asked him, and he had said yes without thinking about it, and then spent the whole afternoon in a plastic chair four rows behind everybody else.

He remembers a woman in the second row who kept turning round to look at the door. He remembers that somebody had brought a tray of sandwiches with the crusts left on and that nobody touched them until it was over. He remembers the noise the chairs made.

And he remembers driving home and sitting on his own drive with the engine off for a long time, and being surprised at himself, because what he felt was not what he had expected.

It was not envy. He was glad for the man from work, genuinely, and told him so on the Monday.

It was a calculation. It ran in his head the whole way home and it has run in his head roughly once a month for eleven years since, and it is one sentence long.

Who would even do it for me?

He has no church. That is not a rebellion and there is no story behind it. He moved for work at twenty three, and the years went the way years go, and now he is a man in his forties who prays in the van and reads a bit at night and has believed the whole thing for longer than he can remember believing anything.

But there is nobody he could ring. There is no minister who knows his name. There is not one person he could reasonably ask without it being the strangest phone call either of them had ever had.

So the question sits there, and every time it comes up he puts it down again, because the answer seems obvious and the answer seems to be nobody.

I want to sit next to that man in the car for a minute, and I want to tell him something before anything else gets said.

The question is real and it is not silly. And the answer is not nobody.

The same question, asked out loud, on an empty road

There is a man in Acts who is about as far from a community as it is possible to get.

He is a foreigner. He is a court official from a long way off, in charge of a queen's treasury, and he is on his way home down a road that the text itself goes out of its way to describe as a desert road. He is sitting in a chariot reading a scroll he cannot follow, and there is nobody within miles who could help him with it.

And before he says one word about any of this, God has already moved a man onto that road to meet him.

Philip does not know why he is going. He is simply told to go south, and he goes, and he ends up walking beside a wheel in the middle of nowhere talking to a stranger about a passage in Isaiah.

And as they were going along the road they came to some water, and the eunuch said, "See, here is water! What prevents me from being baptized?"Acts 8:36

You are somebody God arranges roads for, and that account has no congregation anywhere in it. Scripture puts the whole of it between a stranger and a man who was sent without being told why, and the Holy Spirit is the one who did the sending.

That is your sentence, in the mouth of the least connected man in the book.

What prevents me. He is a foreigner on an empty road with no congregation, no minister who knows him, and nobody at home who would understand a word of it. On paper he has every reason to think the answer is a list.

You are not disqualified by having nobody, and the least connected man in the book asked the same question you have. The written word keeps his sentence rather than correcting it, and the Holy Spirit in you is the reason it reads like your own voice.

And what I want you to see is not his boldness. It is the timing.

The man who would do it was already on that road before the question was asked out loud. God had arranged the meeting while the official was still sitting in a chariot assuming he was on his own.

That is the whole answer to who would even do it, and it is not a technique and it is not networking. It is that heaven moves people. It has always moved people. It moved a man out of a busy season of work and sent him walking down an empty road to catch up with one chariot, and nobody in the story arranged that except God.

Now I want to say two things very plainly, and then I want to leave them alone.

The first is that your standing with God is not provisional. You are not on a waiting list. If Christ has your heart then you are His, today, this evening, in the van, with nothing arranged and nobody rung. Nothing you are carrying tonight is being held back from you until something is organized. That is settled, and I am not going to soften it or add a clause to it.

The second is about the water itself, and it is short. Find someone. Not on your own, not in a river, not in the sea, not out of a book, not at the bottom of your own garden. This is one of the very few things in the Christian life that is meant to have another person's hands in it, and there is no version of doing it alone that I will put in front of you. Ask somebody. That is the whole of my advice, and I am stopping there on purpose.

You are already inside what you have been waiting to be let into. Scripture settles your standing before any arrangement is made, and the Holy Spirit in you is the seal on eleven years that nobody organized and God did not miss.