You Stopped Being A Guest Some Time Ago

He is the one who knows where the extra chairs live.

Third door behind the kitchen, on the left, and you have to lift the top four off the stack before the trolley will roll, because somebody stacked them wrong in about the second year and nobody has ever restacked them properly since. He knows the radiator that bangs in February. He knows that the side door swells in the rain and has to be lifted on the handle. He knows which of the two urns actually boils and which one only looks like it is thinking about it.

Nine years.

And last spring a new person sat down beside him and asked, in the friendly way people do, whether he had been coming long. And he heard his own voice say it, the way it has said it for nine years, easy and automatic and slightly apologetic.

"Oh, I am just visiting."

You have said that sentence more times than you could count. Sometimes you have said it to people who have been coming for two years. You have said it while carrying something. You said it once while holding a key.

And underneath it there is a real thing, and I am not going to pretend there is not. You follow about a third of it. Not because anything is wrong with you and not because anybody there is unkind. It goes fast. It is stitched through with a hundred small references made out of a childhood that was not yours, and the jokes land about half a second before you have finished carrying them across, so by the time you have got it the room has already moved on to the next thing. Meanwhile the language you actually pray in, the one your fear speaks in at three in the morning, is not the one being spoken in that room at all.

So you did the arithmetic that any reasonable man would do. Present, welcome, useful, fond of them, and one third fluent. Therefore, a guest. Therefore, nine years a guest, and it would be presumptuous to call it anything else.

Two words that were canceled in writing

Paul writes one sentence to people in exactly your position, and I want you to see which words he chose to cross out.

Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God;Ephesians 2:19

Two words go, and they are not the same word twice. A stranger is the visitor, the one passing through, the one whose presence is temporary by definition. But the second word is the one that will find you where you live. It is the term for a resident foreigner: the man who lives there legally, permanently, indefinitely, who knows the streets and pays what he owes and could give you directions better than most locals, and who is never, in the eyes of the arrangement, actually of the place.

That is the status you have been keeping yourself in. Not excluded. Resident. Permanently resident and permanently other, which is a status so comfortable to occupy that a man can hold it for nine years without anybody once telling him to.

You are of the place, and the word for a permanent outsider was taken off you in one line. Scripture sets fellow citizen and household exactly where those two words used to stand, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moved you across.

Paul takes both words off you in a single breath. And notice what he does not replace them with. He does not say you are a very welcome guest. He does not say you have earned honorary standing. He says fellow citizens, which is a legal fact about a nation, and he says household, which is a fact about a family, and neither of those words has a temporary setting.

You are one of the household of God, and the visitor status you have been holding was canceled in writing. Ephesians 2:19 is where that cancellation is recorded, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carried it into you rather than filing it somewhere you would never think to look.

You were made a fellow citizen with everybody else in that hall, and no one ever made you a permanent guest except you. Paul put it in the past tense at Ephesians 2:19 and never reissued either word, and the Spirit of God has not been waiting on your fluency before letting it take effect.

A guest does not know which door sticks

Now let me put something ordinary next to something eternal, because the ordinary thing has been sitting in front of you for nine years.

A guest does not know where the extra chairs are kept. A guest does not know that the top four have to come off first. A guest has never once noticed which urn boils. That is not visitor knowledge. There is no such thing as visitor knowledge about a radiator in February. That is the knowledge of somebody who lives there, and you have been quietly accumulating it since a year you can barely remember, while telling anyone who asked that you were passing through.

But I do not want to leave the case resting on the chairs, because a man can be argued out of a chair. So take the far stronger ground, which is what Paul builds this on three verses earlier.

He says that the ones who were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ, and then he says that through Him both of them have access by one Spirit to the Father. One Spirit. Not one language. The route in was never the vocabulary, and it was never the references, and it was never how quickly a man catches a joke about somebody's cousin.

You have access to the Father by the same Spirit as every other person in that room, and none of it routes through the language. Ephesians 2:18 puts the access in the hands of one Spirit rather than in the hands of fluency, and that Spirit is the Holy Spirit Himself, at work in a man who follows a third of it.

And this is not a concession being made for you. It is how the thing was designed. John writes of a crowd nobody could number, out of every nation and every tribe and every tongue, all of them standing in the same place at the same time, and nobody in that scene has been asked to change their mouth first. God has never in the history of the world required a translation in order to hear a man.

It is already yours in the language you think in, and it has been the whole time. Revelation 7:9 shows the crowd standing there in every tongue there is, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed an interpreter to hear what a person meant.