The Chair With My Name On It

The table in the small dining room has been laid since four o'clock, and nobody is coming.

Not laid for anybody in particular. That is the part he would find hardest to explain, and nobody asks him, so he never has to. He lays it most evenings. A cloth, because his mother used a cloth. Two plates, because one plate alone on a table looks like a man who has given up, and he has not given up. Twice a year the good glasses come down off the top shelf and get washed and go back up again, in case.

He keeps the house the way you keep a place for guests. Shoes off at the door, and a little dish there for keys that nobody has ever dropped keys into except him. The spare bed is made and has been made since spring. There is a chair at the end of the table that he never sits in, because it faces the window and it is the better chair, and you give the better chair to the guest. He sits with his back to the window and eats facing that empty chair, and he has done it long enough now that he no longer notices he is doing it.

Then, at ten past seven, somebody knocks.

Not the buzzer downstairs. A knock, on his own door, three of them, unhurried, the way a person knocks when they have the whole evening and no reason to hurry it.

And here is what he does, and it is the entire reason I am telling you this. He does not get up. He turns his head slightly toward the hallway and he waits, and he listens for the knock to move on. Because it will be for the place upstairs, or for the woman on the other side of the wall who has people over on a Friday, or somebody holding a piece of paper with the wrong number written on it. It is not for him. He is not expecting anyone. Nobody wrote. There is no earthly reason for a knock at ten past seven to be meant for a man who lays two plates out of habit and eats his supper facing a chair he keeps empty.

The knock comes again. Three. Unhurried. Whoever it is has not gone away and does not seem to be in any difficulty about waiting.

He looks down the length of the cloth at the good chair facing the window, and he thinks something he has never once said out loud: I have kept that chair for somebody. And in the same breath the other thought arrives, the one that has been underneath the cloth and the glasses and the made bed all along. Not for me, though. Never for me. That chair is for a guest. I am the one who lays the table.

Maybe you know that hallway. Maybe your version of the chair is a room, or an evening, or simply the way you keep yourself tidy and ready and easy to be around in case something good ever turns up, while quietly running the arithmetic that says when the good thing does arrive it will be knocking for the neighbor.

He knows exactly which door He is standing at

Let me say the plain thing first, because the man in the dining room has built an entire life on the opposite of it, and I suspect you have furnished a room or two with it yourself.

The knock is for you. Not for the place upstairs. Not for the woman with people over on a Friday. Yours. And I can say that without flattering you, because the One doing the knocking said out loud what He was knocking for, and it is not an inspection, and it is not a delivery for somebody down the hall.

Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.Revelation 3:20

Look at what He says He is coming in to do. Not to walk through the rooms and check the state of them. Not to see whether the cloth was on, whether the glasses had been washed this year, whether a man who lays two plates for nobody is a little strange. He says He will come in and sup. Eat. Sit down at the table in the evening and take a meal there, and take it with you, off the plates that are already out.

You are the one that knock is for, and it has your own door in it and not the neighbor's. I am not saying that as a comfort I invented. Revelation 3:20 puts Him at the door in His own words, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a written line about a door and sets it down in a hallway at ten past seven, in a house where a man decided long ago that every good arrival must be meant for somebody with more people.

And notice the manner of it. He knocks. He does not come through the wall, and He does not call through the letter slot that you should have been readier by now. He knocks, unhurried, and He waits at a door that only opens from the inside. That is not hesitation on His part. That is courtesy, and courtesy is what you offer a person you came for deliberately.

You have a Guest on the step tonight who came for the meal and not for the inspection. That is not my reading of His mood; it is written in Revelation 3 in His own mouth, that He will come in and sup with him, and the Spirit is the One who turns a sentence first sent to a lukewarm church into a knock that one particular person hears in one particular hallway.

The table was already laid when you got there

Here is the psalm the whole of this stands on, and I am not going to improve on it, because it does not need improving.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.Psalm 23:5

Hear who is doing the work in that line. Not the guest. The Host. He prepares. He anoints. He fills the cup past the brim on purpose, in front of everything in the room that says you have no business eating. David does not lay that table and then wait to see whether anybody comes. David arrives, and it is laid, and the cup is already running over the sides.

That is the reversal standing in your dining room right now, and it is not a small one. You have spent years on the wrong side of the table. You have been the one preparing, the one keeping the good chair free, the one who is ready for a guest and has slowly come to believe that being ready is the whole of his part. And the psalm says the table in question is prepared by the Shepherd, and the chair He set is not for a visitor. It is for the one He brought there.

You are seated at a table you did not lay, and the Shepherd who laid it counted you in before you ever set out a plate. Psalm 23:5 says He prepares it and He fills the cup until it runs over, and the Holy Spirit is the One who carries that off a page and into a small room where somebody has been standing all evening waiting to serve.

So let me go after the sentence that keeps you standing. It is not really about doors and it is not about hospitality. It is the quiet verdict that says good things are for other people and you are the one who gets things ready for them. That verdict has kept a chair empty for years and it has never once been true.

You were never the staff in this house, and you are not on duty tonight. Revelation 3:20 has Him coming in to eat with you rather than to be waited on by you, and the same Spirit who set that line in Scripture is the One pulling the chair out while you are still reaching for the good glasses.