A House Of Prayer For All People

The chair nearest the door is always free, and it is always free because somebody kind has made sure of it.

She knows the routine now. She comes in, and a young woman with a lanyard around her neck spots her from across the room and comes over fast, and says sweetheart, let me get you a seat, and clears a coat off the good chair by the door and holds it for her. It is genuine. There is not a mean bone in that girl. It happens every single time, and it has happened every single time for two years, and by now the chair by the door has become a small fact about her, the way a name becomes a fact.

Then the music starts, and she can feel it in her breastbone, and the words go past on the screen at a speed that assumes eyes twenty years younger than hers. She catches maybe a third of the whole morning. Not the words themselves, she is not deaf. The idiom. They say things like leaning in and doing life together and speaking into it, and she can work out roughly what is meant by the time they have moved on to the next thing, and she is translating for ninety minutes straight, which is tiring in a way that is impossible to describe to anybody who has never had to do it.

This is the only room she can get to. That is the plain fact of her situation, and it is not going to change.

And here is the thing nobody in that building knows about the woman in the chair by the door. She has been praying since before most of their parents were born. She has watched God do things they would not believe if she told them, and she is not going to tell them, because there is no groove in that room for a sentence like that, and she has more sense than to force one.

If that chair is your chair, then you know the strange loneliness of being loved by a room and treated as its visitor at the same time, and you have started to wonder whether the whole thing was really built for somebody else.

He named the house before you walked into it

There were people who had that exact worry a very long time ago, and God answered them in writing, and the answer is stranger and better than anything anybody has said to you over coffee.

The people in question were the sons of the stranger. Foreigners. Outsiders by every measure that mattered to the room, and their worry is stated plainly a verse before the answer comes: they were afraid the LORD would separate them from His people. That is the fear in its own words, and Scripture does not scold them for it or tell them they were being sensitive.

Also the sons of the stranger, that join themselves to the LORD, to serve him, and to love the name of the LORD, to be his servants, every one that keepeth the sabbath from polluting it, and taketh hold of my covenant; Even them will I bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer: their burnt offerings and their sacrifices shall be accepted upon mine altar; for mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all people.Isaiah 56:6-7

Read the last clause again. Mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all people. That is not a welcome extended to a visitor. That is the name of the building, and He gave it that name in advance, and the name is a description of who the house is for.

Right now, as you read, you have a house that was described as yours before you ever came through its door. Isaiah 56:7 named it in writing, and the Holy Spirit seated you under that name.

Notice too who is doing the work in that verse. I will bring them. I will make them joyful. Not they will settle in, not they will eventually feel included once somebody thinks to ask them a question. He brings, He makes joyful, He accepts what is brought to the altar. The whole sentence runs on His verbs, and none of them are waiting on a room to notice you.

You are already accepted at that altar and the accepting was finished before this morning started. He said it in Isaiah 56:7 and it has stood written ever since, and His Spirit is not conducting a second vote on it at the back of the hall.

The belonging never ran through the language

Now let me take the other half of it, the third you follow and the two thirds you do not.

There is a day in Acts when a crowd from fifteen different places heard the wonderful works of God, and every last one of them heard it in the tongue they were born into. Look at the direction that ran. Nobody was handed a course in Galilean. Nobody was told to sit at the front and try harder. Heaven did the adjusting, and it did it before the crowd had done one thing to deserve it, and the Holy Spirit was the one doing it.

That is the pattern, and it has not changed. Your ear is not the entrance. Your comprehension of somebody's phrasing is not the entrance. The house is called a house of prayer, and prayer has no accent and no generation and no screen going too fast.

You are at home in a room you follow a third of, and the belonging does not run through the language. Isaiah 56:7 says all people and never qualifies it, and the Holy Spirit does not operate a second door for guests.

I want to say the age part plainly too, because you have been polite about it for two years. You are not behind that room. You are not a slow one. You have been talking to God since before most of the people in it existed, and nothing about a loud morning and a fast screen makes you a beginner at the one activity the house is actually named after.

And nothing in this is asking you to adjust. Not the volume you can manage, not the words you think in, not the year you were born, not the chair you sit in. You are not a problem to be integrated.

You have a full share here and nobody in that hall issued it to you. Scripture calls the place a house of prayer, and the Spirit taught you to pray in it long before you ever found the door.