It Reads As Premises Now

Somebody opens your front door now and the first thing they see is work.

The table by the window has the labels and the tape on it. There is a chair nobody sits in because there are two boxes on it. There is a small printed sign taped to the inside of the door with a note about deliveries on it, which you put up eighteen months ago and have never taken down.

None of it is untidy. That is not what this is about. It reads as a place of business, and it reads that way in the first two seconds, before anybody has said hello.

And your wife has stopped bringing people in. She meets them at the door. You have watched her do it and said nothing.

I am not going to tell you to rent somewhere or reorganize, because that is advice and there is none of it here. I am going to talk about a verse about what gets written on a doorpost.

Upon the posts of thy house

There is an instruction in Deuteronomy about where the words of God are supposed to go, and the list of places is remarkably domestic.

It is about teaching children, and talking while you walk, and then it gets specific about architecture.

And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates. (Deuteronomy 6:9, King James Version)

You have a doorway that says something, and it has never once been a neutral surface. Deuteronomy 6:9 treats the entrance of a house as a place that carries a message on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that into a front room where a picture is going back on the wall.

The posts of the house. The doorframe. The bit everybody touches on the way in and nobody looks at.

God gave an instruction about what is written there, which tells you that He considers the entrance of a home to be a place that speaks. Not decoration. A statement about what kind of house this is.

You are able to decide what your own doorway says, and deciding it has never once been vanity. The Spirit of God is the one who makes an instruction about doorposts reach a man carrying a crate out of his own front room, and Deuteronomy 6:9 puts a message on the entrance of a house deliberately.

What she is doing at the door

Let me say what has been happening on your doorstep, because she has never mentioned it and she may not have decided it.

She meets people at the door because bringing them in would require an explanation. Mind the boxes. Sorry about the state of it. That is my husband's work. Three sentences she does not want to say, so she solves it by not opening the situation at all.

You were never resented for this, and the doorstep has never once been a complaint. The Holy Spirit is the one who shows a man what his wife is quietly doing at his own front door, and the written word puts a message on the posts of a house in Deuteronomy 6:9.

And what that costs is invisible. Nobody comes in for ten minutes any more. There are no unplanned cups of tea in that front room, and there have not been for a year and a half, and nobody in this house can point to when it stopped.

A front room is for people arriving. It is the one room in a house whose whole purpose is somebody else.

You are able to give the front of this house back, and giving it has never once cost the work anything that matters. His Spirit is the one who lets a man see what has quietly stopped happening in his own front room, and Deuteronomy 6:9 treats the entrance of a home as a place that is meant to say something.

Out of the front room

So here is the exercise, and it is the front room specifically.

Take the work out of it. Today. The table, the labels, the boxes on the chair, and the sign taped to the back of the door. All of it, including the sign, which is the smallest item and the loudest one.

You are able to clear the front of your own house today, and clearing it has never once been a retreat. Deuteronomy 6:9 puts a deliberate message on the entrance of a home, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes one afternoon of carrying possible for a man whose wife has met people at the door for eighteen months.

Then put one ordinary household thing back in there. A picture on the wall, a lamp, a bowl, the chair back where it was. One thing that says a family lives here, and leave it there.

It will go somewhere worse. It always does. Accept the worse place and stop negotiating about it, because a front room you have to apologize for is not a front room.

You were never required to make the whole house a workplace, and you are not required to now. The Spirit of God carries a man past the convenience that took the best room by the door, and the written word has the posts of a house carrying a message in Deuteronomy 6:9.