There is a residential street that runs behind the church, and about eighty meters up it on the left there is a stretch of curb where nobody minds, and you have been leaving the car there since the spring your daughter was born.
She is eleven now. She has never once been dropped at the door of that building.
You have told yourself several things over eleven years and all of them are half true, which is why they have held up so well. The car park fills quickly. It is easier to get out afterwards. The walk is good for you. Every one of those has been said to somebody in the last year with a completely straight face.
Here is what is actually true. The car has a wing that does not match and a back door that has to be pulled hard twice, and there is a sound it makes at low speed that you have stopped hearing except in that car park, where it is suddenly the loudest thing in the county.
So you stop eighty meters up the road, and you walk, and by the time you come round the corner you are just a man arriving on foot, which tells nobody anything.
And I want to say the part that is hard to say, because you have never said it either. It is not the car. There was a different car eleven years ago and you parked round the corner in that one too.
The car is the excuse. The walk is the belief. And your daughter, who is eleven, has now learned the walk.
Where the psalm actually puts the door
There is a line people quote in a small voice, as though it were the sound of someone settling for less, and I have heard it read that way from a platform more than once. It is not that. It is a boast.
For a day in thy courts is better than a thousand. I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God, than to dwell in the tents of wickedness.Psalm 84:10
The man writing that is not apologizing for where he stands. He is saying he would rather hold the door of that house than own the best address anywhere else, and he says it the way a man says a thing he has already decided and is not taking questions about.
Now look at where he puts himself. At the door. In the entrance, the most seen place in the whole building, where every single person who comes in has to pass him.
So hear this before we go on. You are not a man sneaking in from a side street on somebody's tolerance. You are in the courts, and the written word calls one day of that better than a thousand anywhere else, and the Spirit of God is the one who brought you inside the gate in the first place.
That psalm was written by the sons of a family who kept the doors of the temple. Doorkeepers by trade. Not the ones at the front, not the ones with the incense, the ones at the entrance, and it is their song that everybody has been singing for three thousand years.
What Bresee took out of the room
In 1895 a man named Phineas Bresee opened a plain hall near the middle of Los Angeles and made a rule that the whole world has since heard about, which was that nobody could rent a seat in it.
That was not a small thing. A rented pew is a public statement about a household, made in advance, before anybody opens their mouth, and everybody in the room can read it from where they sit. Bresee took the reading out. Every seat free. The people who came in with nothing came in first, by design and out loud.
And here is what I want you to notice, because it is the exact thing that is happening on your street. Nobody in that hall had to arrange their arrival. There was nothing to arrange. The whole apparatus of coming in carefully, of timing it, of walking the last part, exists only in a room where the arrival is being read.
Your room may not be reading it. Honestly, it very probably is not. Nobody in that building has ever looked at your car, because nobody looks at anybody's car.
But you have been reading it for eleven years, out loud, in your own head, on a stretch of curb eighty meters up a residential street. And a verdict you deliver on yourself every week is still a verdict.
You have a place in the courts of God that no walk improves and no car park threatens. His word says it plainly and the Holy Spirit has never once asked you to arrive differently.
Park in the car park.
Not next week when you have had the wing sorted. Not when the noise is fixed. This Sunday, in the car you have, with your daughter in it, in the space nearest the door if there is one. The written word put you in the courts already and the Holy Spirit has been holding that place open the whole eleven years.
And let it make the sound it makes.
I know exactly what that costs, and I am not pretending it costs nothing. But the walk has to end, and it has to end in the one place where it means something, which is the place you have been avoiding for eleven years.
You are not exposed there. You are home there. That is what is written over the courts of God, and His Spirit is the one who parks you, and no wing on any vehicle has ever changed a single line of it.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud in the car, in the car park, before you get out. The right to speak them was never issued on the strength of what you drive. It is Christ's own authority, delegated, and because you are in Christ it has been given to you whole, in the vehicle you actually own. Speak them under not my will, but Thine: He honors in His own way and in His own timing, and one exposed morning is never the measure of what He has already settled.
- Corner, you are not my address and you never were. The written word calls a single day in His courts better than a thousand elsewhere, and the Holy Spirit walked me through that gate long before I started walking the last hundred meters.
- Shame, get out of this car and off this street. Jesus is the door of the house and His Spirit keeps it open, so I drive in the front and I park where everybody parks, in the name of Jesus.
- Father, You seated me in Your own courts and Your word says it and Your Spirit does it. I bring my daughter in through the front door of Your house, and the walk is finished.
Psalm 84:10
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