For the believer who has been keeping God inside the words instead of meeting Him through them.
When did a word you'd said a thousand times last surprise you?
Not move you. Words move people constantly, with help from music, from a room, from grief most of all. I mean surprise, in the plain sense of something turning out to be larger than you had it filed as.
It happened to her on a Thursday in a car park, which is not where she'd have chosen.
She'd been at a building all morning helping to clear it out. The congregation had shrunk, the heating bill hadn't, the decision had been made a year ago, and today was the day of the boxes. She'd carried out hymn books, a lectern, and a box of small wooden crosses somebody had made in 1974.
Standing by the car with the boot open, she said one of the old words out loud, the way you say something to yourself when a day has been heavier than expected.
It did not stay in the building she had just emptied. That's the only way she can describe it. She'd been carrying that word for forty years as something that lived in that room, and she said it in a car park beside a skip, and it was entirely undiminished.
You are able to find that the words don't live in the building, because the One they name never did. The written Word says plainly that God doesn't dwell in temples made with hands, and the Holy Spirit is the one making Him present where you actually are.
What We Quietly File in the Building
Nobody decides to house God. It happens by association, the way a smell lives in a coat.
You meet Him somewhere. Then you go back to that somewhere, weekly, for decades, and every strong moment you've had with Him has happened under the same roof with the same light through the same window. After a while the room and the reality are stored in one place in you.
So when the room goes, some part of you genuinely believes the reality has been reduced. Not as a doctrine. Nobody in that congregation would have said anything so foolish out loud. As a feeling, in the body, standing beside a skip with a box of wooden crosses.
You know that feeling. It isn't superstition and it isn't weak faith. It's what happens to anybody who has met God faithfully in one place for a very long time.
Not in Temples Made With Hands
Here's Paul in Athens, talking to people whose whole city was built around housing the divine:
God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands.Acts 17:24 (KJV)
He's standing in the middle of the most impressive collection of religious architecture in the ancient world, saying that none of it contains who he's talking about.
That isn't an insult to the buildings. He doesn't tell them to pull anything down. He simply says the thing everybody in every generation forgets, which is that a room can be a place where you meet God without ever being a place that holds Him.
You meet Him in a room without that room ever having contained Him. The written Word says He doesn't dwell in what hands have built, and the Holy Spirit is the one making Him present beside a skip on a Thursday.
The Word Was Never a Container
Here's what I'd carry out of that car park if I could take a single thing away with me.
We treat familiar words as containers. Vessels that hold a bit of God, to be handled carefully, kept in the right place, and brought out on the right occasions. That's why they feel diminished in a car park and full in a service.
A word isn't a container. It's a door. And a door doesn't hold anything at all, which is exactly why it works in a building being emptied just as well as it worked in one full of people.
She'd spent forty years being careful with a vessel. Standing beside her car with the boot open, she found out she'd been carrying a door, and doors don't lose anything when the building around them comes down.
What you've been carrying is a door rather than a container, and it opens anywhere. The written Word refuses to house God in anything hands have made, and the Holy Spirit is the one waiting on the other side of the word wherever you say it.
Nothing Here Diminishes the Building
Let me be plain, because there's a version of this message that would wound you and I refuse to write it.
That room mattered. People were married in it, carried out of it, and held up in it through the worst weeks of their lives, and the grief of clearing it is not sentimentality to be corrected. Paul didn't sneer at Athens and I'm not sneering at your building.
I'm also not saying the old words are binding, or that a believer whose room has never said a line of them is missing something. The same faith is held in a building that recites and in one that doesn't, and in a car park with the boot open.
You can grieve the room properly and still find the word undiminished outside it. Scripture honors the meeting without housing the One met, and the Holy Spirit does the accompanying rather than the replacing.
The Word That Works in a Car Park
Here's the turn, and it's quieter than a decision and steadier than a mood.
The ache beside that skip was never unbelief in you. It was forty years of meeting God faithfully under one roof, until the roof and the reality were filed in the same place. Nobody arranged that, and nobody has thought to separate them for you since.
Let me separate them now. He was never in the brickwork. He was in the room the way a friend is in a room, which means He walked out with you carrying a box.
You can say the old word anywhere and find it undiminished. The written Word denies that He dwells in what hands have built, and the Holy Spirit makes I am not reciting, I am agreeing something you do beside a skip.
Declare this over yourself
You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so what follows is not a claim made out of your own authority. It is agreement, said back to God in His own words, while the Holy Spirit carries it. How He orders the rest of it is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own time.
Say this once, slowly, out in the open with nothing over your head.
The sentence was true through every year I said it without hearing it, and it is true now. The Word of God says He does not dwell in temples made with hands, so nothing I have ever loved about a room was ever holding Him. The Holy Spirit makes Him present with me today, in a car park as fully as in a building. I am agreeing with it rather than getting through it. I keep every good year I spent under that roof, and I hold this over them rather than against them. When I say the old word outside, I can find it exactly as large as it always was.
Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.
This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.
Acts 17:24-25
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
