Answering Without Opening An Account

Tarek had been standing in that doorway for twenty minutes and he still had the ladder in his hand.

He had only come to bring it back. That was the whole errand. But it was evening, and the courtyard smelled of onions frying, and the family was sitting down, and the man of the house had done what any man in that street would do, which was to pull out a chair and say the two words: sit, eat.

Tarek said he was only staying a minute.

The chair stayed out. Somebody moved a plate. A boy was sent for another glass without anybody asking Tarek anything, which is how these things are settled in a courtyard, and Tarek felt the floor start to tilt under him the way it always does.

Because here is what he has never said out loud to anybody. Where he grew up, a chair was the first line of a book. You sat once, and you were in. You owed the visits at every feast for the rest of your life. You owed a day of your labor at their harvest and it was never called owing. You owed the right to be asked for anything at any hour, and you owed the particular tone in a woman's voice at a wedding twelve years later saying, of course, he sat at our table once.

He had watched his own father get caught in exactly that. A good man, and by the end he was so tangled in the debts of hospitality he could not walk down his own street without paying somebody in some way.

So Tarek stands. Forty-three years old, holding a ladder, in a doorway, doing sums.

And the host, who had been watching all of this go across his face, laughed. Not unkindly at all. He put a hand on the back of the chair and said: sit down, Tarek. Nobody in this house is writing anything down. The chair is not a contract. It is a chair.

Tarek looked at him.

And the man said it again while he was pouring: I am not opening an account on you. I am asking you to eat.

You know that doorway. You have been standing in it with God for a while now. You know what He is asking, because it is not complicated and it has not changed in months. And you have not answered, and it is not because you do not love Him. It is because you have watched what a yes turns into, and you cannot afford a book with your name at the top of it and no last page.

The ask is real, and the ask is not a ledger

First, the honest part, which is that something is genuinely being asked of you.

This site will never tell you that nothing is asked. That would be a kindness that costs you the whole document. There is a response in this covenant, it has a shape, and a person who never answers is not standing where a person who answers is standing. Say that plainly and then keep going.

Now the division everything turns on, and it goes here, in the middle of the teaching, because it is the load-bearing sentence of the message. One half of this covenant is God's own commitment, and that half is settled, finished, and held up by His faithfulness alone. The other half is your response, which is real, which is genuinely asked, and which is not what is keeping the covenant standing. Those are two different kinds of thing, and a man who cannot tell them apart will spend twenty years in a doorway holding a ladder.

So put your weight on that division right here, before we go on. You are standing on the settled half of this covenant while you are still deciding about your own half, and that order was set long before you knocked at anybody's door. It is promised in plain sentences and it does not shift while you think: the Spirit of God did not follow you to the threshold to wait for an answer, He came in through it with you.

So look at what is actually being asked. Here it is in His own voice, and it is one word long.

Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me.John 15:4

Abide. Stay. Remain where He has put you. That is the verb, and it is worth noticing what kind of verb it is not. It is not achieve. It is not maintain. It is not sustain a level of output sufficient to justify the chair. It is the verb you use for living somewhere.

And look who says it about Himself in the same breath. And I in you. He is not asking you to hold on to a vine. He is telling you the vine has already taken hold of the branch.

You are being asked to stay, not to service anything, and that is not my softening of a hard word: John 15:4 is the word, one syllable of it, and the Spirit of God is at work inside you making a place to live out of what you had been reading as a demand.

Nobody in this house is writing anything down

Now the part that keeps a man standing, which is the book.

The reason a yes feels dangerous is that a yes has been used on you before. Somebody helps you once and it becomes a lever for a decade. So a promise from God gets read the same way, as an opening entry, and the whole rest of your life becomes an installment plan on a chair you sat in.

Hear Him on that.

I will make with them an everlasting covenant, that I will not turn away from doing good to them. And I will put the fear of me in their hearts, that they may not turn from me.Jeremiah 32:40

Read what He binds Himself to. Not turning away from doing good. That is the clause, in the first person, and it is an everlasting one. And then read the second half of the same sentence, because He does not leave your staying to your own stamina either. He puts the thing in your heart that keeps you from turning. Even the response has His hand under it.

You have a God who wrote your side of it into His own commitments, and I am not being poetic: that is Jeremiah 32:40 in plain words, and His Spirit is the one who does that work inside a person rather than standing outside the door timing them.

And about the timing. Nobody is timing you. A slow answer is still an answer, and a man who takes six months to sit down has sat down. There is no lateness clause in this document, and anybody who taught you otherwise was reading a different one.