Not for the Switch, for the Rooms

He is up a stepladder on a Saturday with a screwdriver in his teeth, and the switch he is fitting is a two gang with a dimmer that somebody bought without checking the back box.

He is fifty eight and he has been doing the electrics at that hall for nineteen years.

There are eleven volunteers in the building and half of them do not know his name, which does not bother him and which he has noticed.

Here is what he has been asking for since he was forty seven.

He has asked to be filled with the Holy Spirit, on and off, seriously, for eleven years. He would find it difficult to say out loud in that hall and he has never tried. He is not a man who talks about it and there is nobody in that building he could open the subject with without it becoming a thing.

And in eleven years he has never once asked what it is for.

That is not a criticism and he would not have understood the question. The wanting is real and it has been real the whole time. But if you asked him to describe the far end of it, the answer he would get to, eventually, would be about something happening in him. There the picture stops.

He is fitting the switch and the wires behind it run out to nine rooms he is not thinking about.

The sentence, unsaid: eleven years of wanting a thing and I have never asked what it is wired to.

You may know that switch. Years of asking, and no picture of what it feeds.

He reads the purpose out loud

There is a morning in Nazareth where Jesus stands up in a room He grew up in and reads one paragraph, and the paragraph is almost entirely made of purpose clauses.

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.Luke 4:18

Read the structure. The Spirit is upon me. And then, immediately, because. And then a list.

Every item on that list is a person. The poor, the brokenhearted, the captives, the blind, the bruised. There is not one clause in the whole paragraph describing what the anointing feels like or does inside the one anointed.

You are looking at a sentence that spends itself entirely on other people, and Luke 4:18 attaches the Spirit being upon Him to a list of people rather than to an inward state, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who takes a reading in a hometown synagogue and lands it on a man up a stepladder on a Saturday.

The power is wired to rooms

Consider the shape of what he does for a living, because it is the plainest available picture of what that verse describes.

A switch is not the point of an electrical installation. Nobody has ever stood in an empty building admiring a switch. It exists because there are rooms, and it is wired to them, and the entire reason anybody runs a cable is that somebody is going to be in a room and want to see.

He has spent eleven years asking about the switch.

That is not a foolish thing to have done, because a switch is where a person stands, and the wanting is not misplaced. But the purpose clause in Luke 4 runs from the anointing straight out to a list of people, and a man who has never pictured the rooms has been reading half the diagram.

You have been asking about the thing that is wired to something, because the written word runs from the Spirit being upon Him directly into a list of who it is for, and the Spirit of God is what turns a plan on a wall into something a man can see from a ladder.

And notice that Jesus does not begin with the list. He begins with the anointing and then explains it. The order is receiving first and purpose second, which means nobody is being told to earn anything by finding a room.

You are not being handed a bill for the eleven years, and Luke 4 puts the Spirit upon Him before it names a single person, and the same Spirit who was on Him is the one who fills.

Not seeing the rooms yet is not receiving less

Now the thing that has to be said carefully, because this article could quietly do damage.

There are readers who have been filled and cannot see what any of it is for, and some of them have been in that position for years, and nothing here says they got a smaller portion.

The rooms in an installation exist whether or not anybody has been in them yet. A cable run to an empty room on a Saturday is not a lesser cable, and half the wiring in that hall has been feeding a room nobody used for nineteen years and it is not defective.

You were never handed one watt less for not seeing it yet, because Luke 4:18 describes an anointing and its purpose without setting a schedule for either, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a relief rather than a new thing to be behind on.