The Open Window Over Plot Nine

Saturday morning on the allotments and everybody is out. Plot seven has a radio going and an argument about slug pellets. Plot eleven has three generations of the same family and a wheelbarrow being pushed by somebody far too small for it. Somebody's kettle is on in a shed. It is a good place to be, and there is not a person on that path who is not glad it is not raining.

On plot nine, Ray is leaning on a fork he has not moved for four minutes, looking at the sky over the hedge.

Eight months ago he sat in a hall with about six hundred other people and heard Malachi read out loud. Prove me now, the windows of heaven, and then somebody described what would come through the window, and what they described was money. Not crudely. Warmly, and with real conviction, and Ray went home lit up like a bulb.

He has watched that window every day since. He has watched it the way a man watches for a parcel he has a tracking number for. And nothing came, and if you asked him he would tell you honestly that he is not bitter about the nothing, and he would be telling the truth. He has been broke before and he has been fine before and he can live with either.

What has hollowed him out is something he has not said to a living soul, and he only worked it out this morning standing here with the fork. Eight months ago he wanted God. Somewhere in the eight months, without deciding to, he swapped that for wanting the delivery. And now he is standing on his own plot on a bright morning with people laughing either side of him, and he cannot find the earlier want anywhere in himself.

If that is you, put the fork down for a minute. This one is not about the delivery.

Who Is Actually Being Tested

Start with the sentence itself, because most of the trouble comes from reading five words instead of a chapter.

Prove me now. Those are God's words and He is the one saying them. He is not setting the reader an examination; He is offering His own faithfulness to be found true, which is a startling thing for God to do and is the whole tenderness of the verse. The one on trial in Malachi 3 is God. He puts Himself in the dock voluntarily and invites a people who had every reason to doubt Him to come and check.

And notice what the chapter is actually about, because it is not abstract. There was a storehouse attached to a temple, and the people who served there ate out of it, and it had gone empty. Meat in my house, God says. That is food, for people, who were hungry. The setting is a nation, a building and a meal, and it is worth keeping the verse inside its own street rather than lifting it out and pointing it at your Saturday.

So let me say the thing this whole page exists to say, and I want it in your hands before we go one line further. Nothing is being asked of you here. Not a thing. You are not being set a test, you are not being told to prove anything, and there is no step for you to take to make God faithful, because Scripture says His faithfulness is His own and it reaches to the clouds whether anybody tests it or not. That is not my kindness talking. It is what is written, and it is the Holy Spirit's business to make it land in a man who has spent eight months feeling assessed.

Now, the window. What does an open heaven pour out?

Peter answers that in public, in front of a crowd, on the first day anybody had ever seen one. He is standing in Jerusalem trying to explain what has just happened to a hundred and twenty ordinary people, and this is his explanation.

Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you yourselves are seeing and hearing.Acts 2:33

Read the object of that verb. He has poured out this. Not a consignment. Not an improvement in anybody's circumstances, and not one of those hundred and twenty went home to find their situation upgraded. What came through the open heaven was the Spirit of God Himself, arriving on people, and Peter names Him as the promise, singular, the thing the Father had been holding for the right morning.

That is what an open heaven pours out. God pours out God. He is not sending goods on His own behalf; He is coming Himself, and He does not consider that a smaller delivery than the one you were watching for.

So take this now, in the sun, with your neighbors calling across the path. Heaven is open over you already. Not pending, not conditional on a lever you have not pulled. The word says the veil was torn from the top down and the access was made, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a felt reality in a man rather than a fact he has heard about, and neither of those things is waiting on you to qualify.

I want to say something about the want that went missing, because that is the actual wound on plot nine and it is a common one.

You did not become greedy. Watch that thought carefully, because it is the accusation waiting for you and it is not the truth. What happened is much more ordinary and much more human: somebody put a picture in front of you, and hope is an obedient animal that runs toward whatever picture it is shown. Your hope did what hope does. It just got pointed at a parcel.

And here is the good news that ought to make a man laugh out loud on his own allotment. The want has not been destroyed. It has been redirected, and a thing that can be redirected can be redirected back. You were given the Spirit of God, and it is the Spirit who stirs a person to want the Father in the first place, and Scripture calls Him the Spirit of adoption, the one who teaches a person to say Father, so the wanting was never something you generated and it is not something you have to manufacture again now.