The top fence is the excuse and everybody in his house knows it is the excuse.
There is nothing wrong with the top fence. He walks it most mornings anyway, up through the gate and along the shoulder of the hill, and he is up there before the light is properly up, and the mist sits down in the bottom in a way that never gets old.
The dog has stopped pretending it is about the fence too.
In March a man he respects, a good man, prayed for him at the end of a meeting in a hall with a bad heater, and said the windows of heaven were opening over his ground, and then said what that would look like.
There was a list. He remembers the list. Three or four things, all of them decent things, none of them foolish, and one of them he would not turn down.
He has thought about that list maybe twice since March.
He has come up this ridge, on the other hand, near enough every morning, and it is not for the fence and it is not for the view and it is not for the dog.
It is because when he was twenty-six he stood at this exact gate on a morning like this one and God said something to him. Nothing dramatic. Eleven words, if that. And he has never told anybody what they were, and he has never had a morning like it since, and he is fifty-four.
That is what he is up here for. That is what he has been up here for, quietly, for twenty-eight years.
And nobody has ever offered him that. Not in a meeting, not in a hall, not on a list.
And you know that exactly, because there is something that happened to you once that you have never told anybody about and would trade everything on anybody's list to have again.
An open sky means God, not a delivery
Let us settle what governs this whole page. It is not a technique and there is nothing on it being asked of you.
You are looking at an invitation, and the One being tested inside it is God. Follow the verb and it lands on Him. He is under examination. He offered to be found out. And there is no appeal at the bottom of this page and nothing to sign anywhere on it. It is written, put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts (Malachi 3:10), and the Holy Spirit is the One who lets a reader hear that verb land where it actually lands.
Now the phrase, because so many people have furnished it that it barely has a floor of its own.
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
That was said to a nation in one decade about one building, where the store room had gone empty and the families who served there had gone home hungry, and what was named was that the fields would not fail again. It is a sentence about people eating. It was never a lever, and nothing you have or have not done has ever worked it. The Holy Spirit is the One who makes that true in a person rather than merely accurate on a page.
So the honest question is what an open sky is for, in Scripture, when there is nobody in front of it reading out a list.
Go and look at every place the sky opens in that book. Same answer every time, and it is not a delivery.
At the Jordan, the heavens are torn open, the Spirit comes down like a dove, and a voice says, this is my beloved Son (Matthew 3:16). Nothing is handed over. Somebody is named, and God is there.
Stephen looks up in the last minutes of his life and says, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God (Acts 7:56). Nothing lands in his hands. He sees a Person on His feet, and it carries him.
Jacob sleeps on a stone in an ordinary field, sees a stairway, and wakes saying, surely the Lord is in this place and I did not know it (Genesis 28:16). He does not wake up richer. He wakes up in a field that turned out to have God in it.
What comes down through an open heaven is God Himself, and He has never once sent a delivery in His own place. It is written that He will pour out His Spirit on all flesh (Joel 2:28), and on the day that happened there was wind and fire and God in a room, and the crowd in the street reported people talking about the mighty works of God, not a haul. It is the Holy Spirit, and not this paragraph, who takes that off a page and sets it down on a ridge at first light.
Now the part that is for the man at the gate.
You are allowed to want the voice more than the yield, and God has never once called that ingratitude. The psalmist said one thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord (Psalm 27:4). One thing, out of a whole kingdom of concerns. The Spirit is what makes that a permission rather than a poem.
And the twenty-eight years of mornings are not evidence against you.
The silence since you were twenty-six is not God going off you, and He has not been withholding Himself pending anything. It is written that He is faithful, for He cannot deny Himself (2 Timothy 2:13), and that is not a response to how a man's decades have gone. It is a description of what He is made of. His Spirit is what makes that a floor to stand on rather than a fact to nod at.
Now the guardrail, and it is why this site exists.
Nothing here connects what you have or have not put anywhere to what God does, in either direction. Nothing on this page predicts a change on your ground, and nothing on it is going to tell you that a season is turning, because nobody writing to you has been given the right to say that. What is being said is what is written: God pours out Himself, His nearness is the gift and not the deposit on one, and He is not rationing it. It is the Holy Spirit, and not the writing, who turns what is on the page into something that holds weight.
And for the reader up here with his jaw set: some of you did what that verse was used to ask of you. Honest, at cost, and you watched, and nothing opened. Nobody here will explain that away, stand up for anybody, or hint you read the terms wrong. Nobody will tell you it was too little or that you believed it poorly, because that is a lie and it has hurt enough people already. Your disappointment can walk this fence line with its boots on.
So stand at the gate a while longer and say the true thing out loud.
An open heaven is not a list of yields. What comes down through it is God, and He does not send the crop on ahead of Himself, and He is not rationing His own presence to a man who has waited twenty-eight years.
You are allowed to want the eleven words more than everything on the March list. That is not a small prayer. That is the prayer the sky opens for.
Nothing is required of you for that to be true. It was true at twenty-six and it is true this morning.
You are walking a fence line under a heaven that is genuinely open, and what comes through it is God and not a list. It is written that God has poured out His Spirit, which is the promise of the Father (Acts 2:33). The Holy Spirit is the pouring itself, and He was over that ground in March and is over it at first light today.
Come and look. He has nothing behind His back.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud where you are standing. You have the right to speak them because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and that standing was handed to you and not earned, which is exactly what this verse has been used to cover over. Scripture is the ground under every line and the Holy Spirit is what makes them live in a man. Speak first to the list you were handed, then to the thing you have quietly concluded during the long quiet, and then turn and speak to Him. Whatever He does in the weeks after you say them is His, and it is not a scoreboard.
- List I was handed in March, you are not what I climb this ridge for. What God pours out is Himself, He is not rationing it, and I have never once come up here for a yield.
- Verdict that twenty-eight quiet mornings mean God has gone off me, you are not walking this fence line. It is written that He remains faithful and cannot deny Himself, and the Spirit is the One who makes that the ground under my boots instead of a line I once learned.
- Jesus, You tore the sky open at a river and the Father said, this is My Son, and that is what an open heaven has always been for. I stand under it in Your name with nothing in my hands, because the nearness is the gift, and nobody ever asked me what I come out here for.
Malachi 3:10
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.
