The Chair Nobody Wanted To Sit Next To

He read the whole book through four times a year and he could tell you where anything was.

He prayed on his knees in the front room every morning at half past five and every one of you knew it, because the boards creaked and because you slept above him and because he never once mentioned it to anybody.

He gave away more than anybody knew, and you only found out about a fraction of it at the funeral.

And at Christmas dinner there were eleven grandchildren and there was a chair at his end of the table, and every year, without any of you ever discussing it, there was a small movement about ninety seconds before everybody sat down.

Nobody wanted it. You all loved him. Nobody wanted the chair.

You have never been able to put those two things down side by side and look at them, and you are fifty-one, and he has been gone nineteen years.

And here is what it has actually done, which is why this is not a story about your grandfather.

It has made the word holiness into a room you do not want to go into. Somebody says it from a platform and something in you goes quiet and slightly cold, and you have never told anybody that, and it has been going on for about thirty years.

John puts the two words in the same sentence

There is a line in a letter written by a very old man who had known Jesus personally, and it does something with the word God that ought to make everybody stop.

And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.1 John 4:16

God is love.

Not: God is loving. Not: God has love, among other attributes, alongside the more demanding ones. It is an identity sentence, and John, who is the man who saw the transfiguration and who leaned on Him at supper and who watched Him die, chose it as the summary.

Now hold that against a chair at the end of a table.

Whatever your grandfather was, and he was a great many good things, the thing you learned in that room was that getting closer to God moves a person further from being wanted, and that is not merely sad. It is the exact reverse of what is written.

So take this now, nineteen years on. You have been given a false picture of the destination and you are allowed to put it down. The written word says God is love and makes it an identity rather than a quality, and the Holy Spirit is the one who dwells in a person and produces the resemblance.

What your grandfather was and was not

Now let me be extremely careful, because I am not going to let this become a page that prosecutes a man who cannot answer, and who prayed for you by name every morning of your childhood at half past five.

Here is what I think is true and I offer it gently.

He was born in a hard year in a hard place and he was raised by people who had been through something, and severity was the material he was handed. He took the gospel and he put it inside the only container he had.

The container was not the gospel. It came from a house in 1931.

And there is more evidence than you think. He gave away more than anybody knew. That is not severity, that is tenderness, and it was running the whole time underneath a manner he could not change, and eleven grandchildren never saw it because he had no way to bring it up out of himself.

That is not a hard man. That is a warm man in a hard case, and the case was fitted long before he ever knelt on those boards.

You are not being called toward the case. His word puts God's own identity in the word love, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the dwelling, and no amount of nearness to God has ever made a person less possible to sit beside.

The plain hall and what holiness meant in it

In 1895 a man named Phineas Bresee opened a hall near the middle of Los Angeles and would not let anybody rent a seat, and the doctrine that hall was built to preach was holiness.

That is the thing to hold, because the two facts belong together and they usually get separated.

The holiness preached in that room was preached in a place with free seats, to people off the street, by people running missions in the neighborhood, and the accounts of it are full of warmth and noise and food. Whatever else it was, it was not severe, and it was not preached at a distance, and the people who received it went out and sat with people nobody else would sit with.

That is the original shape of the word, and it is a long way from a chair at the end of a table, and the distance between those two things is a century of ordinary human drift and not a doctrine.

The written word makes God's identity love and the Holy Spirit is the one who reproduces it, and the word you have been flinching from was never the word that made that chair.