The Outside Of The Cup

Everybody says it. They have been saying it for about fourteen years.

There is no house like yours. The bread comes out of the oven at the right time and there is always more than there needs to be, and nobody has ever left your door without being pressed to take something with them, and you know the name of every child of every person who has ever sat at that table.

Sadia said, at the end of the summer, that your house was the only place she had felt properly at home since her mother died.

She meant it. You could see that she meant it.

And you said the right thing back, and you were entirely sincere in saying it, and about eleven seconds later you were in the kitchen alone with a stack of plates and you noticed, in a completely detached way, that you had felt nothing at all.

Not annoyance. Not tiredness. Not resentment, which would at least be something and which you could take to God as a fault.

Nothing. A clean, level nothing, and it has been there for years, and you have been standing over the sink and looking at it, and it does not seem to have a name.

Here is what makes it unbearable. You cannot tell anybody. What would you say. A woman who complains that her beautiful house feels like nothing to her sounds like a woman who wants to be told again how beautiful the house is.

So it stays in the kitchen. Fourteen years of a full table and a woman alone with a stack of plates at half past ten.

Jesus said the order matters and He said it about a cup

There is a sentence He said to men who had built their whole lives around getting things right on the outside, and it gets quoted as an insult when it is actually an instruction with a sequence in it.

Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also.Matthew 23:26

Cleanse first that which is within.

He does not say the outside does not matter. Look at the last clause: that the outside may be clean also. The outside is still in the sentence and still wanted. What He says is that the order has been reversed, and that when you work from the outside in, the outside is all you ever get.

And notice what He is actually offering in that line. He is not condemning a man for a dirty cup. He is telling him where to start so that the whole cup can be clean.

So take this now, at half past ten with a stack of plates. You are not a fraud in your own house. That is the accusation you have been half agreeing with for years and it is not true. His word puts the beginning of the work on the inside and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the cleansing, and the reason fourteen years of a beautiful outside has not reached the inside is that outsides do not travel inward. They never have.

The nothing is not what you think it is

Now let me say something about the nothing, because the written word diagnoses it differently than you have, and the Holy Spirit is a better physician than the verdict you have been carrying, which is doing more harm than the thing itself.

You have decided it means you do not love these people.

You do love them. You would be at Sadia's door in the middle of the night with your coat over your nightdress and everybody who knows you knows it. Love is not primarily a sensation and it never was, and a woman who has fed a street for fourteen years has evidence about her own heart that a feeling at a sink cannot overturn.

What the nothing actually is, most likely, is what happens to a person who has run a good thing on her own strength for a very long time without ever once being filled from anywhere.

The bread came out of your oven. The plates went into your sink. The hospitality came out of you, and there was never a point in fourteen years at which anything went in.

That is not sin. That is arithmetic.

And it is precisely why the promise is worded the way it is. You have an inside that God offers to work on directly, and it is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who fills what has been pouring out, and you have never once had to earn that by hosting anybody.

The plain hall and the clean heart

There was a hall in Los Angeles in 1895 where a man named Phineas Bresee refused to let anybody rent a seat, and the doctrine preached in that plain room was a clean heart: God's own work, done on the inside, given to people who had been treated as though they were not the sort who got one.

The two belong together and are almost always separated, and when they are separated this doctrine turns into the exact thing it was meant to end.

Preached in a room where the good seats are bought, a clean heart becomes a standard, and a standard becomes a ranking, and a woman standing at a sink at half past ten hears the whole thing as one more room she is behind in.

Preached in a plain hall with nothing to buy, it stays what it is: a gift, handed to somebody with nothing, doing what they could not do.

You are eligible for that this evening, in the state you are in. The written word starts on the inside and the Holy Spirit does the starting, and there is no queue and no order of merit anywhere in it.