Five Chairs and a High Window

There is a chapel on the second floor of that hospital between a stairwell and a store cupboard, and it is easy to miss, and it is unlocked at every hour of the day and night.

Five chairs. A small table with a cloth on it. A high window that is too high to see anything out of and that lets in a square of light that moves across the floor over an afternoon. A visitors' book on the table with a pen tied to it, and the entries in it are the most honest writing in that building.

He has been in here eleven minutes.

He came up for a reason and the reason was to pray, and he had it in mind on the stairs, and he sat down and put his hands together in the way he was taught as a boy, and nothing has happened since.

Not because he does not believe. He believes entirely. And not because he cannot think of anything to say, because there are four or five things he could say without any trouble at all.

It is that he has a rule.

He has never written it down and he has never said it to anybody and he could not tell you when it started. The rule is that he is not permitted to say the ordinary things until he has said the one thing, and he is not going to say the one thing, and so nothing gets said, and eleven minutes goes past in a quiet room with a square of light moving across the floor.

Sit down on one of the other chairs with me. Today I am speaking to the one who did something a good way back, took it to God straight and meant every word, and now cannot start.

And let me say this before anything else: nothing in this message makes naming it a condition of anything, and I am not going to suggest that not naming it is avoidance either. It is not.

Look at what kind of throne it is

There is a sentence in Hebrews that gets read as an invitation to be brave, and the invitation is not really the point of it. The point is the furniture.

Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.Hebrews 4:16

The throne of grace.

Sit with that pairing, because it is a strange one. A throne is where a ruling is issued. It is the seat of judgment, the place where a case is heard and a finding is entered, and in every court in the ancient world a man approaching a throne knew exactly what he was walking toward.

And this one is named after the thing it dispenses, and the thing it dispenses is grace.

That is not a softer throne. It is a throne whose entire business is favor that was not earned, which means a man walking up to it with nothing in his hands is not arriving badly prepared. He is arriving exactly as its business requires.

You are coming to a throne whose whole trade is grace, and you were never expected to bring a case. I am not offering you a gentler picture. The written word names the throne after grace and puts mercy and help on the other side of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it into a man on the second floor with his hands together.

In time of need, which means on time

Now the last clause, because it does something quiet and I do not want you to walk past it.

Grace to help in time of need. The word behind in time of need is a word about timing. Well timed. Opportune. Arriving at the right moment rather than early or late.

Which tells you that the help in that verse is not a general provision sitting in a store somewhere. It is help that arrives when it is needed, and God is the one who does the timing.

You have been treating your prayer as a thing that must be got right before it will work, and this verse treats the whole matter as an arrival. You come. Mercy is obtained. Grace turns up on time. There is no stage in that sequence where a man has to produce a document first.

You have grace that arrives at the right hour, and you were never in charge of the timing of it. Scripture puts the timing in that clause and puts it in God's hands, and it is His Spirit, not a better opening sentence, who makes help arrive in a room where a man has been sitting for eleven minutes.