You Still Have Your Coat On

She has a key to this house and she has just rung the bell.

She does it every Tuesday. Her father-in-law opens the door in his socks and says what he always says, which is that she does not have to do that, and she laughs and says she knows, and next Tuesday she rings it again.

Inside it is an ordinary evening. The television is on low in the back room with nobody watching it. The kitchen smells of onions, the window over the sink has gone opaque with steam, and her son is at the table with his homework spread out and one shoe off. She stands just inside the doorway with her coat still on, because taking your coat off is what you do in a house you are staying in, and she has never once let herself decide that she is.

Nine years in this family. She knows exactly which drawer the spoons are in and she is not going to open it. When she wants a cup of tea she says, "Is it all right if I," and lets the sentence trail off, and somebody says of course it is, love, and she says thanks, and she means it.

Nobody in that house thinks she is a guest. Only she does.

And you know exactly how that feels, because you pray like that.

Listen to the way you ask

Here is a small thing nobody has said to you.

Listen to the first eight words of your prayers.

Not the request. The run up. The part where you say sorry for coming back about this again, or where you mention that you know there are people worse off, or where you set out your reasons as though somebody is going to check them. You make your case before you make your ask, because somewhere in you the ask on its own does not feel like enough.

That is a stranger's grammar. It is the voice of a person on a doorstep in the rain, being polite, hoping to be let in.

And the tiredness underneath it is real. You have asked for the same thing for years. Peace about the same situation. A settled mind at three in the morning. Some sense that God actually likes you rather than tolerating you on a technicality. Scripture says your Father knows what you need before you ask, and the Spirit is the one who keeps carrying the asking anyway. You have asked and asked and never once felt any of it land anywhere, and after enough of that a person stops asking loudly and starts asking apologetically, and calls it humility, because there is no other word lying around.

It is not humility. Humility knows exactly who it is.

And you are family, and the grammar you have been using does not fit you. Galatians 4:6 says God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father, and the crying started in you before you were confident enough to join in, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than your run up who is named as the one saying it.

And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father. Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ.Galatians 4:6-7

Look at what He actually sent.

He did not send a rulebook into your heart, or the conditions, or a review date. He sent the Spirit of His own Son, and He gave Him one word to cry, and the word is a family word. Not sir. Not sorry. Father.

Then comes the sentence that settles the whole thing. If a son, then an heir. Not may become. Not will be assessed. Those two words hinge on each other, and the hinge is not your conduct, it is whose you are.

And notice what the inheritance is, because this is where people go wrong on the word. Read it again and see who is named in it. An heir of God. Not of a sum. Not of an amount that arrives later if the paperwork holds up. Of God. What has been left to you is the Father Himself, His Spirit in you, and the standing to walk in and speak. Every smaller thing anyone has ever attached to that word is smaller than what Paul wrote.

Which means the question you keep quietly running, have I done enough this week to be asking, has nothing left to hold on to.

A servant's standing rises and falls with his work. That is what makes him a servant. He is only ever as welcome as his last week was, so he asks carefully, apologizes first, and takes nothing without checking. Scripture calls that the spirit of bondage again to fear, and the Spirit you actually received is named in the same breath as the opposite of it. If that is how you were taught to pray, it does not feel like fear from the inside. It feels like manners.

A son's standing does not move, because it was never resting on him. It rests on the Father, and the Father does not change His mind about who His children are between Tuesday and Thursday.

And you are no more a servant, whatever this week looked like. Galatians 4:7 says wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son, and no more is the language of a change already made rather than one under review, and the Spirit is the one who makes that settle in a person who has spent years keeping their coat on in their own hallway.

Two things follow, and you need both of them.

The first is that this is now, and not once you are further along. The Spirit crying Father in you is present tense, and an inheritance you are queueing for is not what the verse describes. Adoption is not probation, and Scripture never once describes family status being handed over by installments.

The second is that it is yours. Personally. Not the mature ones', not the people who seem to find it easy. Yours, at your own kitchen door, with your coat still on and nine years of asking permission behind you.

And here is why any of this ends with you opening your mouth. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed says to the mountain, move, and it moves. He did not tell anybody to plead with the mountain. He told them to speak to it. Scripture puts it exactly that plainly, and the Spirit is the one who makes a mustard seed enough. That is authority handed down inside the family, and you are in the family. A person who has been given the run of a house is allowed to say out loud what the house is.