The Household Of Faith Has A Door

Sunday lunch at his sister's, and the good plates are out because it is somebody's birthday.

It is a warm house. Nobody in it has ever been unkind to him. His brother in law tops up his glass without asking and calls him by the name only that family uses. And in a gap between the meat and the cake he says, without weighing it first, that he had been reading something in Isaiah that week and it had taken the top of his head off. Two seconds go by. His sister smiles at him with real affection, the way you smile at somebody you would defend in a parking lot. Then his nephew asks whether he ever got the noise in the car sorted out, and the table goes on, and it is fine, and it is genuinely fine, and something in him files the moment away with about nine hundred others.

Later he carries the trash cans down to the curb because it is the sort of thing he does, and on the way back he stops on the step. Coat on. Hand on the door frame. The window light is yellow and the noise inside is good and he can hear all of it from where he is standing, and he waits there about four seconds longer than a man needs to wait before opening a door.

You know that step. Not that step, but yours, and there is one at every group you have ever been near: the half pace back at the school gate, the coat kept on, the seat by the aisle. You have spent a life being welcome and being outside at the same time, and you have got so used to the arrangement that you would not know how to describe it to anybody. So let me put one word in front of you, and let me show you what is behind it.

A household is people, and people of a house

Paul is closing the letter to the Galatians. He has spent five chapters on the hardest argument of his life and now he is doing what he does at the end, handing out short practical instructions, one after another, and one of them goes like this.

As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith.Galatians 6:10

Now the word household there is not a warm figure of speech he reached for. It is a hard little Greek word built straight off the word for a house, and it means the people of a house: the ones who live there, whose things are in the rooms, who know which stair creaks. Not visitors. Not the neighbors, however welcome. The people of the house.

And a word like that carries architecture in it. You cannot have a household without a house, in the same way you cannot have a crew without a ship. So when Paul says the household of faith, he is not paying anybody a compliment. He is naming a building he assumes his readers are already standing inside of, and he is so certain of it that he does not stop to argue the point. He just gives them an instruction that would make no sense at all unless they were in there.

You are one of the people of that house, and Paul assumed it about you a very long time before you ever wondered about it. Galatians 6:10 uses the word household and never qualifies it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brought you in through the door rather than any welcome you managed to earn at a table.

Notice what that does to the step. A step is what you stand on when the question of whether you are in the house has not been settled. That is the whole function of a doorstep: it is the place where a man waits for the answer. But the answer in Galatians came before the question was asked, and it came in writing, and there is nobody left inside for you to wait on.

You have a place in this house that was never a matter of being asked in, and no quiet second at any table has ever moved it by a hair. The word says household and means the people of a house, and the Spirit who put you among them does not run the room's reaction through anything before He keeps you there.

The house is older than the room

Here is the second thing about the word, and it is the part that changes your Sunday.

A house outlives everybody in it. The people of a house are not only the ones eating in it this afternoon. There are hands on those door frames that finished their work two hundred years ago. And the household of faith is exactly like that, only more so, because the house is God's and the family in it does not thin out at the edge of your century.

Which means the household you are in has members you cannot see for reasons that have nothing to do with your address. A woman who prayed in a language you do not have, four hundred years before your grandmother was born, and who wrote out the same verse you were shaking over on Wednesday. A man who sat where you sit, in your same kind of quiet, and did his believing with nobody in the room. They are not your inspiration. That word is far too thin. They are your relatives.

And your own family, the good and kind people at that table, are not standing against anything. Do not let this article make them into an obstacle, because they are not one and they never were. They are the family God gave you and you love them. What Galatians is telling you is that God has given you a second set of relatives on top of the ones you already have, and that the two lists were never in competition.

You have kin in this faith you have never met and some you never will, and they are relatives rather than examples. Paul wrote household as a fact and not as an encouragement, and it is the Holy Spirit, the same one who filled every one of them in their own century, who makes that a family tie rather than a nice thought.

Right now, as you read this, you are inside a house older than every group you have stood at the edge of, and none of those groups was ever the house. That is written down in Galatians 6:10 and the letter does not hedge it, and His Spirit is what makes an old sentence into ground you can put weight on.