I Cannot Arrive Empty Handed

In the house he grew up in, you did not walk into somebody's home with nothing in your hands. Not ever. Not for five minutes. Not to drop something off.

Bread, or fruit, or a bag of something from the market, or if there was truly nothing then you stopped at the shop on the corner and you bought whatever they had, and everybody knew you had done it at the corner and it did not matter, because the point was never the thing. The point was that a person does not arrive empty.

His brother died four years ago in April.

At the burial, standing on the dirt with his hand on his brother's oldest son's shoulder, he told God he would bring the family back together to pray. Every week, the way their father had done it, the way it had stopped when their father died and nobody had picked it up.

He never did it once.

There were reasons and they were all good and none of them held. There was the estate, and there was the sister who was not speaking to the other sister, and there was the fact that he could not imagine himself at the head of that room, and above all there was the sheer weight of starting a thing you had promised at a graveside.

Four years. And here is where he actually is, which nobody who knows him would guess, because he is at prayers and he is generous and he is the one people call:

He cannot come to God about it. Because he would be arriving with nothing in his hands.

That is the exact shape of it. He has nothing to bring. No week of prayer to report, no reconciled sisters, no first meeting, not even a date in a calendar. And a man does not walk into a house with nothing. He was raised better than that, by people he loved, and the rule is in him at a level below thinking.

You may have that rule in you too, in your own version. You cannot come to God with nothing. You have to bring something, even a small thing, even a start. And you have not got a start.

The people He calls by name

Now let me put you in front of a passage where God does the inviting, and let me ask you to look at how He describes the ones He is calling.

This is Isaiah, and the setting is a market. There is a voice going up like a trader's voice, calling people over. And the people it calls are identified by what they do not have.

Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.Isaiah 55:1

You are the one that voice singles out, and the empty hands are the qualification and not the obstacle. Isaiah 55:1 names the man with no money as the one being called, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been calling you over from that stall for four years.

He that hath no money

Read who is named. The thirsty. And then, explicitly, he that hath no money.

That is not an oversight and it is not generosity toward an unfortunate minority. It is the qualification. In a market, the man with nothing in his hand is the one man who cannot participate, and he is the one this voice singles out and calls over.

And then the phrase that should stop a man of your upbringing where he stands: without money and without price.

Twice. He says it twice, because once is not enough to dislodge what everybody in that market knows, which is that things cost. He is not offering a discount for the poor. He is saying that in this transaction there is no price at all, and therefore nothing you could bring would be the right thing to bring, because the right thing to bring does not exist.

You are called by name as the one with nothing, and having nothing is what makes the invitation yours. Isaiah 55:1 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of a market long ago and stands it beside a man on the dirt at a burial.

I want to honor the rule before I take it off you, because it is a good rule and it came from good people.

You do not arrive empty handed at a neighbor's house, and you should not, and I would not want to live in a world where that changed. It is a way of saying: I am not here to take from you. It protects the host's dignity and it protects yours.

But that rule exists between equals, or near enough. It is how two households treat each other. It has never applied at a father's house to his own son, and it has certainly never applied here, and applying it here has cost you four years of not talking to God about the one thing you most need to talk to Him about.

You are a son at your Father's house and not a neighbor at a door. Scripture puts the calling in His mouth and the emptiness in your hands and says the price does not exist, and the Spirit of God has been calling you over from that market stall the whole four years.

Nothing goes back on

Now let me be careful, because this is exactly where a preacher does damage.

I am not going to take the bag out of your hands and give you a smaller one. I am not going to say that what you really need to bring is a repentant heart, or willingness, or a date in the calendar by Friday. That would be the same rule with a lighter parcel, and you would stand outside the same door working out whether what you had was enough.

The rule comes off. Nothing replaces it.

You are inside on His terms this evening, and His terms have already been satisfied by Him. His word says it and does not soften it, and that is the plain sense of without money and without price, and His Spirit has been the one keeping that true while you looked for something to carry.

And the family? It matters. Those sisters matter and that room matters and I suspect He is going to do something about it. But that is what happens after a man sits down at a table, and it is not what gets him to the table.