Nobody Sits In There Now

Nobody sits in there now, and it used to be the best place in this house in July.

The garage. Door up, two chairs, a radio, your wife coming out with a mug and standing in the doorway, and whoever was around drifting in and out of it for an hour. That happened most summer evenings for about nine years.

And then the benches went in, and the stock went along the back wall, and then along the side, and the chairs went to the dump in a clear out two springs ago and nobody said anything about it.

Last July nobody went in there except you. This July it will be the same unless something changes, and you are the only person in this house who can change it.

I am not going to tell you to rent a unit or to be tidier, because that is advice and there is none of it here. I am going to talk about a line in a psalm about how a man walks around inside his own house.

I will walk within my house

There is a verse in Psalm 101 where David makes a commitment, and what is striking is the location of it.

Most commitments are about the public world. This one is specifically about indoors.

I will behave myself wisely in a perfect way. O when wilt thou come unto me? I will walk within my house with a perfect heart. (Psalm 101:2, King James Version)

You have a house you walk around inside, and what happens in it has never once been too small to matter to God. Psalm 101:2 has a man commit himself specifically to how he carries himself at home, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that to an open garage door on an evening in spring.

Within my house. Not in the assembly, not in the gate, not in front of people. The part of his life that nobody sees, and he names it as the place where his heart is going to be kept right.

Which tells you something about how God weighs a house. A man's own rooms are not a lesser arena. They are the arena that gets named.

You are answerable for your own house, and that has never once been a burden. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a king's private commitment reach a man standing on his own concrete floor, and Psalm 101:2 puts the walking within a house at the center of a man's intention.

What the garage actually was

Let me say what has been lost, because it was not storage space and it was not a hobby room.

It was the one place in that house where people were near each other without anything being arranged. Nobody planned a garage evening. It happened because there were chairs and the door was open, and a place like that is almost impossible to create on purpose.

You were not losing a room, and it has never once been only a building. The Holy Spirit is the one who shows a man what a place was really for, and the written word has a man commit to how he walks inside his own house in Psalm 101:2.

And nobody mourned it out loud because nobody could point at it. You cannot miss a thing that never had a name. There was no garage evening in the calendar, so there was nothing to call off, and it simply stopped.

Two springs. Nine years of evenings before that.

You have the power to start that again, and it has never once needed anybody else's permission. His Spirit is the one who lets a man see the size of a thing he stopped by accident, and Psalm 101:2 treats a man's conduct in his own house as a matter he decides deliberately.

Two chairs, today

So here is the exercise, and it is two chairs.

Put two chairs back in there. Today. Clear enough space in front of them that a person could sit down and stretch their legs out without moving a box.

You are able to put two chairs back today, and doing it has never once cost the work anything. Psalm 101:2 has a man commit to the way he walks inside his own house, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes two chairs and a cleared square of floor possible in an hour.

Then sit in one tonight, with the door up, and do nothing. Not for long and not as an event. Sit there, and let whoever is in the house notice that somebody is sitting in the garage again.

Do not announce it and do not explain what you are doing. Announcing it would make it an occasion, and the whole value of the thing was that it was never an occasion.

You were never required to turn the whole house into premises, and you are not required to now. The Spirit of God carries a man past a clear out that was never thought about, and the written word has the walking within a house named as a deliberate choice in Psalm 101:2.