The Sanctuary After Everybody Left

Half past one. The last car left about twenty minutes ago and it was the woman who does the coffee, and she waved.

He is sitting in the third row, on the aisle, which is not where he ever sits.

The chairs are crooked the way chairs get after two hundred people have used them. There is a bulletin under the row in front. Somebody's child has left a shoe. The lights are half off because the man who does the lights kills the front bank when he leaves, and nobody has hit the panel yet.

It was the best Sunday of the year.

That is not modesty or immodesty, it is a fact about the morning. Three people stayed at the end and one said something he will remember for a decade. The thing he had worked on for six weeks landed. A family who have been on the edge of leaving for a year sat near the front and stayed for coffee.

And he is sitting in the third row at half past one and there is something he cannot get to the bottom of.

He is not depressed. He has been, and he knows the difference, and this is not that. He is not burned out in the way the books describe. He is not lonely; he has a wife he likes and four people he can call.

The nearest he can get to it is this: he gave something away this morning that he does not know how to receive.

He has been standing in front of people handing them something for nineteen years. It comes through him. He is not confused about the source and he has never once thought it was his. But it goes through him and out, and there is a person in the third row at half past one on the best Sunday of the year who is not sure when anything last came the other way.

And he has never said that out loud, because there is no version of a pastor saying it that does not sound like fishing.

And you know that row. There is a hunger in you and it is not about wanting anybody, and it does not fit any of the categories, and you have never found a sentence for it that would not embarrass you.

So take this in before we go a step further. You are not fishing and there is nothing wrong with you for sitting here. Psalm 42:7 says deep calleth unto deep, which is a phrase for something in a person that only answers to something at the same depth, and the Holy Spirit is in this room with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

A spring, not a delivery

There is a sentence Jesus says at a well in the middle of the day, to somebody who came at that hour specifically to avoid people, and the picture in it is worth everything to a man in row three.

But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.John 4:14

A well of water springing up in him.

Not a jar. Not a delivery. Not a supply that has to be fetched from somewhere and carried back and rationed until the next trip. A spring, inside a person, moving upward under its own pressure.

That distinction is the whole of this article, because a man who has been in ministry for nineteen years is an expert at fetching. You know exactly how to go and get something and carry it back and hand it out. That is the trade. And you have been quietly assuming that being filled works the same way, that it is a matter of getting to a source and drawing and returning, and that the reason you are dry in row three is that you have not managed the trip lately.

He is describing something else entirely. He is describing water that is already in the person and comes up from underneath.

You have a spring in you and it does not have to be carried in from anywhere. The written word says a well springing up in him rather than a supply brought to him, which means the dryness in row three is not evidence of a failed trip; and the Holy Spirit is the one who is that spring, in an empty sanctuary, at half past one, with the chairs still crooked.

And notice who He said it to. A woman at a well at noon, which is the wrong time of day to draw water and is the time you choose when you would rather not meet anybody. He offered an interior spring to somebody arranging her life around not being seen.

The trade makes it worse, and that is not your fault

I want to name something specific to your position, because a general article about being poured out will not touch it.

Everything you know about receiving, you learned in order to give. You read to preach. You pray about people. You go to conferences that are about how to do this. Even your reflection has a purpose attached to it, and it has for nineteen years, and none of that is corruption, it is simply what happens to a man whose work is the same material as his own soul.

So when you sit in row three and think you should be filled somehow, the only mechanism you have available is the one that ends in output, and there is nowhere for it to land.

That is not hypocrisy and it is not a spiritual failure. It is an occupational fact, and almost nobody says it out loud to the people it happens to.

You were not being professional about God, and the machinery you have was built for the job you were given. Psalm 23:2 says he maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters, and both verbs are things done to a sheep that would not do either on its own; His Spirit is the one doing that making and leading, and He is not measuring your devotional life.

And here is the second half, and it is the one I want to be most careful about. I am not going to tell you what this hunger is about, or trace it to a season, or explain you to yourself. Nobody writing at a distance can do that honestly, and the trade of doing it anyway has done real damage to people in your position.

What is true is that the ache is real, and it does not have to be diagnosed before it can be met, and there is no requirement anywhere that a man understand his own thirst before he is allowed to drink.

You are not being asked to account for it, and no explanation is being required first. John 7:37 has Him standing up and crying, if any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink, and the only qualification named in the sentence is the thirst; the same Spirit who had that written is the one who has sat in this building through nineteen years of Sundays.

Third row, on the aisle

Here is what I want you to notice about where you are sitting, because you noticed it yourself and then moved past it.

You are in the third row, on the aisle. That is not where you sit. Where you sit is on the platform, or at the front on the side, or at the back near the sound desk when somebody else is preaching.

You have, without deciding to, sat down in a congregation seat in your own empty building.

I do not think that is nothing. I think a man who has been standing in front of people for nineteen years sat down in the third row at half past one because some part of him wanted, for a few minutes, to be somebody who is sat facing the front rather than somebody stood facing the back.

And that is available. Not as a technique and not as a schedule change. Right now, in that chair, for the next ten minutes, with the lights half off and nobody in the building.

You are allowed to be one of the people in the room, and you are already sitting where they sit. Scripture says a well of water springing up in him, and a spring does not require the man above it to do anything at all; the Holy Spirit is the one who put you in a congregation seat on the best Sunday of the year.

So the empty sanctuary is not where the giving ran out. It is a room with crooked chairs and a lost shoe in it, and a man sitting in the third row facing the front, over the top of a spring that does not have to be carried in from anywhere.

And if this is heavier than a page can carry, find a real person this week. If it has gone darker than tired, call or text 988.