I Bring the Whole Day in Through That Door

Ten past six, and you have worked out that the first ninety seconds decide the whole evening.

Not because anybody has said so. Nobody in that house has ever sat you down about it and you would be genuinely surprised if any of them could describe it.

But you have started watching yourself, which is a strange thing to do to a person, and here is what you see.

You come through the door. You put the bag down. And before you have said one word, something arrives with you: the meeting at four that went badly, the message you have not answered, a particular colleague's face. You have not mentioned any of it. You are not going to mention any of it; you have never been a man who comes home and unloads.

But it comes in anyway. It comes in through your shoulders and the way you put the keys in the bowl and how long it takes you to answer when somebody asks a normal question from another room.

And within about a minute and a half, the temperature of that house has adjusted itself to you. Quietly. Nobody deciding anything. The way a room adjusts to an open window.

You noticed it properly on Tuesday because Tuesday had been a good day, and the whole evening was different, and it was not different because anything else in that house had changed.

That is the part you cannot get past. It is you. You are the weather.

Joshua said it about his own mouth

Stand in the doorway a minute. Do not go through yet. There is a thing to say and it takes six seconds.

Let me put the true thing down first, and Scripture will hold me to it and the Spirit will not have me making a man ashamed of a hallway: you have not been doing anything wrong. A man who has had a bad day and does not unload it on his family is a man exercising restraint, not a man causing a problem. Nobody in that house is on trial and neither are you. What you have noticed is not a fault. It is influence, and influence is what happens when a household loves somebody.

And nobody else is in scope here. Not your wife, not your children, not one word about what anybody else brings into that hall. Your own mouth is the only thing this article is about.

Now come and look at the most famous sentence ever spoken about a house, and look at what it actually contains.

And if it seem evil unto you to serve the LORD, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.Joshua 24:15

An old man says that in front of a nation. And notice how much of it is a demand on other people: none of it.

He tells them to choose. He does not tell them what to choose. He does not describe what will happen to them if they choose wrong. He turns from the crowd, states what he himself is going to do, and includes his household in it with his own mouth.

As for me. That is the whole mechanism. He speaks for what is his to speak for, out loud, in front of everyone, and he does not say one word about anybody else's obedience.

You have exactly that authority in your own hallway, and it covers your own mouth and your own house and it does not require anybody else in there to do anything. That is not me making a small thing of a hard evening. That is what is written, and what Joshua's sentence contains and what it deliberately leaves out, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it in a hall at ten past six.

Here is what nobody explains about blessing a house. When you speak over that hallway, you are not managing anybody's mood and you are not performing calm you do not feel. You are agreeing out loud with what God has already said. Your mouth is a door. God is the one coming through it, and He does not require you to have had a good Tuesday.

A word spoken in that doorway does not depend on the day you have had, and it is not a technique for controlling the room. Scripture says peace be to this house, which is what Christ told His people to say on entering one (Luke 10:5), and He gave that instruction to men walking into houses they knew nothing about, and the Spirit is the one who carries it whether or not the room notices.

What you are actually carrying in

Now let me name it precisely, because you have been half diagnosing it as a mood problem and it is not one. What is written names it differently, and the Spirit is not accusing you of a temper.

You are not bringing home a bad temper. If you were, this would be simpler and somebody would have mentioned it by now.

What is written has never once called that a sin, and the Spirit has no complaint about a man who cares about his work. What you are bringing home is unfinished business, which has a different physics. A bad temper announces itself and gets dealt with. Unfinished business does not announce itself at all; it just keeps a man's attention half-elsewhere, and a household reads a half-present man instantly and adjusts, because that is what people who love somebody do.

So the hallway does not go quiet because you are difficult. It goes quiet because everybody in it can tell that some of you is still at a meeting at four o'clock.

That is not a character failing and I will not make it one. It is what a working day does to a person who cares about their work. And what is written never once asked a man to arrive home emptied out first, and the Spirit is not waiting in that hall for you to be settled before He will do anything.

God does not require you to have left the day behind before you can speak good over your own house. It is written that the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:7), and passeth all understanding means precisely that it does not wait for the circumstances to make sense first, and the same Spirit who breathed that is standing in this hallway with you, which is why it lands as a fact about the room and not as advice about your commute.

Hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you to stop caring about the four o'clock meeting, or to leave work at work, or any of the other things people say that have never once worked for anybody. And I am not telling you the evening will go well if you say this. I have no authority to promise you an atmosphere in return for six seconds.

What I can put in your hands is this: something can come through that door ahead of the day, and you are the one who gets to say what it is. God's word does not come back to Him empty (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and a man saying eight words in a doorway with his coat still on is not performing anything. He is putting something down first.