I Read My Own House Like A Reply

She does a circuit of the house last thing at night. Everybody does. Lights, back door, the switch on the extension lead that she does not trust.

But she does something else on that circuit that nobody knows about, and she has been doing it for three years, and if she is honest with herself it is the reason she never lets anybody else lock up.

She reads the rooms.

The hall, where the paint she started in the spring is still cut in around one door and nowhere else. The back bedroom that is a box room again after everything. The kitchen tap. The car she can see through the front window that starts on the second go now instead of the first.

She goes round the house every night and every room says the same thing to her, in the same voice, and the sentence it says is: this is what God thinks of what you did.

Because three years ago she gave. Properly. The thing she had put aside, which had taken a long time to put aside, handed over after that verse was read out on a Sunday, and she did it clear eyed and she did it glad.

And she is not angry with the people. She has thought about that a lot and she is genuinely not.

She is just going round her own house at eleven at night reading the walls.

And you know that, because there is a room in your house you cannot walk into without hearing a sentence.

Your house is not God's reply

Let us settle what governs this page. It is not a technique, and nothing on it is being asked of you.

You are looking at an invitation, and the One being tested in it is God. Follow the verb and it lands on Him. He is under examination. He offered to be found out. There is no appeal at the bottom of this page, no request three paragraphs down, nothing to join and nothing to sign, and there never will be on this site. It is written, and thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts (Malachi 3:10), and it is the Holy Spirit, not this page, who takes the sentence back off the people who borrowed it.

Now the sentence, in its own room.

Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.Malachi 3:10

Said to a nation, in one decade, about one building, where the store room had emptied and the families who served there had gone home hungry. What it names is that the fields would not fail again. It is a sentence about people eating, it was never a switch, and nothing you handed over has ever operated it in either direction.

Now the thing that gets said first here, because everywhere else it gets said last or not at all.

You were not foolish, and believing God is not the part of this to be ashamed of. What happened in you that Sunday was faith, and faith is not the same as being taken in. It is written that faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen (Hebrews 11:1), and the list that follows is full of people who acted on what God said and did not all live to see how it came out, and Scripture calls them commended. It is the Holy Spirit, and not this page, who makes that read as an address to a woman doing a circuit of her own house at eleven.

Now the reading.

The Bible is unusually blunt about treating your circumstances as a message, and it never softens it.

A man born blind is put in front of Jesus and the disciples ask the natural question: whose fault, his or his parents. Jesus says neither (John 9:3). Not a lesser fault. Neither.

A tower falls in Siloam and kills eighteen people. Jesus raises it Himself and asks whether the crowd thinks those eighteen were worse offenders than everybody else in that city, and He answers His own question: no (Luke 13:4).

And Asaph, in a song still sitting in the middle of the Bible, writes that he looked at how comfortably things went for people who had no interest in God at all and nearly lost his footing entirely (Psalm 73:2). Nobody edited it out. It is in there because your circuit of the house is an ancient walk and God is not shocked by it.

Your house is not a reply from God, and He has never once corresponded with anybody through their kitchen tap. It is written that He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and the unjust (Matthew 5:45). That is not a promise about fairness. It is a plain statement that the weather is not a message, and neither is a box room. The Spirit is the one who gets that underneath three years of reading.

And here is what did not happen, which is what this page is actually about.

God has not withdrawn from you, and the state of these rooms is not the sound of Him stepping back. It is written that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, is able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:38). Things present. Three years, named in the list, already on the losing side of that sentence. His Spirit is what turns that from a verse you know into a floor under your feet at eleven at night.

Now the guardrail, and it is why this whole site exists.

Nobody here is going to tell you this is the season it turns. Nobody here is going to hint that because you gave, something is quietly on its way to you instead. That is the same machine wearing a kinder face, and you have had enough of machines.

God's faithfulness to you was never payment for what you handed over, and that is the best news in this house, because a thing that was never payment can never be overdue. It is written that if we are faithless He remains faithful, for He cannot deny Himself (2 Timothy 2:13). His faithfulness is not a response to yours. It is what He is made of. The Spirit is the one who makes that the reason a woman can turn a light off without reading the room.