Sure The Room Cannot Hold It

She holds two certainties and they will not sit in the same room, which is more or less the problem in a sentence.

The first is that what came to her in March was God. She does not wobble on that. She has examined it from every angle available to a sensible woman and it stands up, and if anybody tried to explain it away in front of her she would be unusually firm about it.

The second is that the church she has attended since she was twenty three could not possibly hold it.

Not out of contempt. She loves that congregation. She has been fed there, married there, and carried through two dreadful years by people in it. It is simply that the room is what it is, and when she imagines what came in March being spoken about out loud in that building, something in her closes like a shutter.

So she has been living in an odd arrangement for five months: certain of the fire and certain of the walls, and privately concluding that one of them is going to have to give.

If you have quietly measured your church against what happened to you, come and sit down here with me. Nobody in that congregation is going to be criticized on this page.

Who is doing the holding

Let us look at the arrangement itself, because there is an assumption underneath it that has never been said out loud.

The assumption is that a room holds what God gives, and therefore a room's capacity is the limit on what He will do there. That sounds obviously true and it is why nobody examines it.

But it puts a building in a position no building has ever occupied. Nothing in Scripture is contained by the place it happened in, and nothing there is scaled to the venue's ability to cope.

You are not holding something a room has to be big enough for. What came in March is held by God and not by the walls of any building. I am not saying that to be encouraging. The written word says will God indeed dwell on the earth? behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded (1 Kings 8:27), which is a man opening a magnificent temple by saying plainly that it cannot hold what is arriving in it, and the Holy Spirit presses that home in a woman doing arithmetic about her own building.

The prayer at the opening of the temple

Here is what changed this for me, and it is not a comment about your congregation.

Solomon has finished the most extraordinary building project in the history of his nation. It is the day it opens. Everything is right, the money was spent, the craftsmen were the best available.

But will God indeed dwell on the earth? behold, the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded?1 Kings 8:27

He says it out loud, at the dedication, with everybody standing there. The building is inadequate. He knows it, he says so, and he does not stop the service.

And then God fills it anyway. The inadequacy was never the question, because the holding was never being done by the stones.

You were never asked to find a room big enough, and Scripture has the best room ever built described as too small by the man who built it. That is written into the dedication itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries that into a hall with the chairs still out.

Nothing here says the shutter is wrong

Something must be said very plainly, because a page like this can easily start telling somebody what to do with what they know.

Your instinct about that room might be entirely accurate. You know it and I do not. Nothing here says the reading is wrong, and neither the written word nor the Holy Spirit is telling anybody to go and speak about March in a room where their own judgement says do not.

The claim is only about who is doing the carrying.

You can be renewed in the room you are already in, and the room's capacity was never the thing holding what He gave you. Scripture says that ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them (2 Corinthians 6:16), which relocates the dwelling into people rather than into premises, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a set of walls, who does the containing.

And if these five months have cost more than anybody in that building knows, if sleep has gone, if the Sundays have started to frighten, please tell somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.