I Said This Would Be a Christian Home

They got the keys on a Friday and slept on a mattress in the front room because the bed had not come, and she woke at about five and lay there looking at a ceiling that was hers.

And she said it then, quietly, with him asleep next to her: this is going to be a Christian home.

She meant it beautifully. She was twenty seven and she had a picture, and in the picture there were people around a table and a Bible somewhere obvious and children who prayed without being asked and a husband who did the thing at Christmas where the father reads.

He was not interested then and he is not interested now. He is a good man. He came to the christenings, he comes at Christmas, he has never once said a word against any of it, and he is simply not interested, and he has been completely honest about that for the whole nine years.

She has not been honest.

She has been managing. There is no other word for it and she found the word herself, at about two in the morning, and it landed like a diagnosis. Podcasts left playing when he comes in. A conversation started at exactly the moment when he cannot easily leave it. Friends invited who she knows will say something. The children deployed, in small ways, without ever saying so.

Nine years of it, and the house is tired, and last month her eldest said something at dinner that she has not been able to stop hearing, and it was not even about God.

You may be managing somebody. And you may have called it faithfulness, and you may be the only person in the house who does not know that everybody knows.

What a house does to a person in it

Now let me put something in front of you that you have probably read and never applied to your own hallway.

Paul is answering a question about mixed households, and the assumption behind the question is that the believing partner is contaminated by the arrangement. And he turns it exactly the other way round.

For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband: else were your children unclean; but now are they holy.1 Corinthians 7:14

You are the reason that house is reached, and it has been reached on every day you organized nothing. 1 Corinthians 7:14 runs the influence outward from the one who belongs, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been in those rooms for nine years without any assistance.

The influence runs the other way

The question assumed that the unbelief in a house spreads. Paul says the holiness does.

Now, he is not saying your husband is saved because you are; he says elsewhere in the same passage that you cannot know that. What he is saying is about a household as a unit: there is a person in that house who belongs to God, and that fact reaches the whole arrangement, and it is not diluted by anybody's disinterest.

Which means your presence in those rooms has been doing something for nine years that none of the managing has done, and it has been doing it while you were asleep, and while you were being unbearable at dinner, and on the Sundays you did not go.

You have been sanctifying that house by being in it, and it happened without a single thing you organized. 1 Corinthians 7:14 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of an answer to a question about mixed marriages and lays it on a woman at two in the morning.

Now let me be careful, because this is the landing category and it has a hard rule in it: nothing here gets to be exercised over anybody's will.

I am not telling you to stand in your kitchen and declare your husband into anything. Not tonight, not ever. He is a man with a will that God Himself declines to override, and any authority I handed you over it would be a counterfeit and would do damage.

What I am telling you is that the covenant reaches that house through the person who is in it, and the person who is in it is you.

You are standing in this covenant and you are standing in it here, in these actual rooms. Scripture says the household is reached through the one who belongs, and the Spirit of God is the one who has been in those rooms for nine years without any assistance.

What the managing was

And now the honest part, which you already know at two in the morning and needed somebody else to say in daylight.

The managing was not faith. It was faith's understudy. It arrived because the thing you actually wanted was not happening and there was a long silence where the answer should have been, and a competent woman cannot sit in a long silence without organizing something.

That is not wickedness. It is what capable people do with grief.

But it has cost you, and it has cost the house, and the specific cost is that your husband has spent nine years being handled by somebody who loves him, which is a lonely thing to be, and your children have watched it.

You are released from a job that was never given to you. His word says it and does not soften it, and that is what it means that the sanctifying runs from the believer outward rather than being manufactured, and His Spirit has been carrying that house the whole time.