We Used To Host And Then We Stopped

There was a stretch of about nine years when your house was where people came.

Not formally. Nobody called it anything. But there was a period when the kitchen had more chairs pulled into it than it had room for, and people came round without ringing first, and there were evenings that went on longer than anybody planned.

And then it stopped.

You could probably name the year. Most people can. Something changed, and the thing that changed was usually not about hosting at all. A job. A health thing. A move. A death. A season where everybody was too tired.

And here is the part that people never expect. It never started again.

Not because anybody decided. Because there was no moment that would obviously have been the restart, and each individual week there was a reason, and six years of individually reasonable weeks add up to a house that people no longer come to.

Now the house has a second layer on it, and this is the thing that keeps it shut.

The house is not as it was. Something has been meaning to be dealt with for four years. The room that used to hold everybody has something in it now. And so the restart, when you think about it, has a job attached to it, and the job is not small, and so it stays a thought.

Tonight I want to detach the job.

She constrained us

There is a woman in Acts who gets four words of description and one of the most forceful sentences in the book.

And when she was baptized, and her household, she besought us, saying, If ye have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come into my house, and abide there. And she constrained us. (Acts 16:15, King James Version)

She constrained us. That is Luke, writing about himself, saying that this woman more or less made them come.

You are able to be the one who insists rather than the one who waits, and a house has never once needed a reason to be offered beyond the person offering it. Acts 16:15 records a woman pressing an invitation without one word about what her house was like, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says so to a man six years out of the habit.

Now look at the argument she uses, because it is the only argument she makes.

If ye have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come into my house.

That is the whole case. Not the size of the house. Not what she was going to feed them. She puts herself forward as the reason, and then she presses it until they come.

You have yourself as the reason people would come, and a house has never once been the argument for or against an evening. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a person the reason rather than a setting, and it is written in Acts 16:15 that she pressed the point and they went.

Detaching the job

Now the practical thing, and it is the whole of the second half of this article.

The restart currently has a job attached to it. Getting the house sorted first. Doing something about the room. Making it what it was.

That attachment is the reason nothing has happened in six years, and it is worth seeing clearly that nobody attached it deliberately. It grew.

And it is doing a very particular kind of damage, because a job that has been waiting four years is not going to be done in the next two weeks, which means the restart sits permanently parked behind something that never moves.

You are able to detach an evening from a job, and a house has never once had to be restored before people could be in it. The Holy Spirit is the one who separates a thing worth doing from a thing that has been waiting, and Acts 16:15 has an invitation pressed without any preparation recorded at all.

And here is the other thing, and it is worth hearing from somebody who is not in your house.

The people who used to come are not comparing. They remember your house as the place they were happy, and human memory does not store furniture. It stores who was there and what was said and the fact that it went on longer than planned.

Whatever is in the room now, they are not going to see the room. They are going to see that they are in your house again after six years, and that is going to be the whole content of the evening for them.

You are holding something people have actually missed, and six years of absence has never once been about anything anybody could see. The Spirit of God is the one who is present when people are glad to be somewhere again, and it is written in Acts 16:15 that a woman made the case on herself and won it.

And this, plainly, in these words. That house is not a report on you. Not on the six years, not on what happened in the year it stopped, not on what has been waiting four years to be dealt with. A house that went quiet is not a verdict on the man in it, and I am not going to allow it to be read that way while he is sitting in his own kitchen.

You are a man whose worth was settled a long way from a dining room, and a quiet house has never once been a statement about the man who used to fill it. Acts 16:15 makes the person the argument in Acts 16, and the same Spirit who inspired that line is in the kitchen with you.

Two people, one hour, this week

So here is the assignment, and the numbers are deliberately small.

Ask two people to come round this week for an hour, and open the door without doing anything to the house first.

Two. Not the old crowd. Not an evening. Two people who used to come, asked for an hour on a specific day, with nothing attached.

Ask directly and ask soon. Come round Thursday for an hour. Do not explain the six years, do not apologize in advance, do not say the place is not what it was, because that is a job attached to an invitation and we have just detached one.

You are able to ask two people for one hour with nothing welded onto it, and an invitation has never once needed an explanation of the years before it. The Holy Spirit is the one who moves a man to send a message he has been not sending for six years, and Acts 16:15 has a woman press an invitation with herself as the entire reason.

Then the second half.

Do nothing to the house. Not on the day, not the night before.

The room they walk into is the room. And here is why that matters more in this article than anywhere else: if the restart requires the house to be ready, then it happens once, and the next one waits for the house to be ready again, and the whole thing is back where it started inside a month.

An evening that requires no preparation can happen again next week.

You are building something that can repeat, and an hour that costs nothing to arrange has never once been a lesser evening than one that took a week. The Spirit of God is the one present in an ordinary hour in a house that has been quiet, and it is written in Acts 16:15 that she constrained them and they came.