He can date it by the fence. He put those posts in the spring, drove them himself on a Saturday, and they went in the color of fresh pine. They are silver gray now, that soft weathered gray cedar goes when it has had two full winters on it, and every time he walks the line he thinks the same thing: that is how long it has been since I was in a room with other believers.
His mother lives with him now. She needs somebody in the house, and somebody is him, and that is not a complaint, it is just the arrangement. He can get to the feed store and back. He can stand at the end of the drive with the dog. He cannot be gone for three hours on a Sunday morning, and the nearest place is fifty minutes each way, and the arithmetic has never once worked out and he has stopped doing it.
So he reads at the kitchen table before she is up. He prays out at the fence line. And once every couple of months, mostly late at night, the thought comes and sits down across from him: whatever it is I used to be part of, I am probably not part of it anymore. Not thrown out. Just lapsed. Like a man whose license quietly expired while he was busy.
Maybe your fence is a hospital corridor, or a job that runs Sundays, or a town where you know every road and not one believer. And you have started to think of yourself as somebody who used to be in it. I want to take you to a sentence in Hebrews, and I want you to watch the verb, because the verb is not doing what you think it is doing.
Watch the tense of the verb
Name the pit first. The pit is that you have started measuring your standing in miles, and mileage is a terrible unit for this. If distance decides it, then everybody's membership is a sliding scale, and the person who lives closest to a building is the most fully God's, which is an idea nobody would say out loud and half of us are quietly running.
Hebrews 12 breaks the unit. The writer is telling believers what they have come to, and he does not say what they are going to come to when circumstances improve.
You are already arrived, and it happened without a mile of road. Hebrews 12:23 uses a verb that has already happened. Twenty centuries of the Spirit at work have not walked it back one inch.
To the general assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect,Hebrews 12:23
Back up one verse and you get the whole sweep. Ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, and to an innumerable company of angels, and then this line about the general assembly. Ye are come. Not ye are coming. Not ye shall come. Come, done, arrived, standing there.
And here is the part that should stop a man in a kitchen at six in the morning. He wrote that to people who had not gone anywhere. They had not traveled. They were scattered, pressured, some of them hiding, and he tells them flatly that they have arrived at a gathering. The arrival was not a journey any of them made. It was done to them.
You have arrived at the assembly and your legs had nothing to do with it. Look at the tense: it is written as a finished thing. Then ask what could make an arrival real in a house a man cannot leave, and the answer is the Holy Spirit, who never needed a road.
An assembly you cannot be far from
Now think about what distance actually is. Distance is measured between two points. You can be far from a building because a building sits at a coordinate. You can be far from a town, a family, a road.
But look at what the general assembly in Hebrews 12 is described as. The church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. God the Judge of all. The spirits of just men made perfect. That is not a coordinate. It is not somewhere you can be fifty minutes from. There is no route to it and no drive time and no parking, and a man standing at a fence line in the gray light is exactly as near to it as anybody else alive.
You are as near to it as anyone on earth, and you were before you got out of bed. Hebrews 12:22 says ye are come, plural and finished, and the same Spirit carried you in without a mile of road.
I want to be careful here, because there is a kind way of saying this that is actually cruel. The cruel version says: your distance is a season, hang in there, you will be back in a room eventually and then this will be resolved. That treats you as a member on hold and your years as a waiting room. It is not what the passage says and it is not what I am saying.
Your share is not smaller. Not a fraction smaller. There is no arrangement in the New Testament where the housebound believer, the caregiver, the man fifty minutes out, the one on the night shift, holds a reduced portion of the people of God until attendance resumes. That arrangement does not exist. Somebody invented it and it got into the water and you have been drinking it for two years.
You have a full share, and there is no reduced kind for people who cannot get there. Psalm 139:8 says there is nowhere His hand is not, and it stands written. Whatever the Spirit does among the people of God, He does at full strength in a back bedroom at six in the morning.
So here is the turn.
You have been living as a man whose membership lapsed. What Hebrews puts in front of you is that the verb was never yours to keep current. Ye are come. Somebody else did the bringing, and the bringing is finished, and the two winters on that fence did not touch it.
Which means the kitchen table before your mother wakes up is not a substitute for something. It is not the emergency arrangement of a man who fell out of the real thing. You are in the general assembly at that table. You are in it out at the fence line with the dog and the gray posts. The gathering you were afraid you had drifted out of is one you are standing inside of, and you were standing inside it the whole two years while you were counting.
Grieve the room if you miss the room. That is honest and I would never talk you out of it. Just do not let the grief file a report about your standing, because it does not have the authority and it never did.
You are one of them today, and two years changed nothing about it. It is promised right there in Hebrews 12 and never once conditioned on a distance, and the Spirit did not consult a map before He brought you in.
Declare this over yourself
You are not producing anything here. You are saying out loud what God has already written over a man seated with His own people, which is what a believer is licensed to do, and Jesus taught His people to say a thing and not waver in the heart. The Spirit is what makes the written word live in a man's mouth. So speak these plainly, and let Him work them out in His own way and in His own hours, because the Father's will toward you is good.
- Two years without a gathering, you are not a gap in my membership. Hebrews 12:23 says I am come to the general assembly, and it says it in a tense that is already finished. I have arrived, and I arrived from a back bedroom.
- Verdict that I have quietly lapsed, you are overturned in the name of Jesus. God wrote ye are come in the perfect tense about people who had not traveled anywhere. Take the mileage with you when you go.
- Lord, You are the God of the whole assembly and You did the gathering Yourself. You seated me among them without a mile of road, and You have never counted my share as the smaller one. I am come, and You are the one who brought me.
Hebrews 12:23
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.