For the facilitator who has been doing the work for years and still measures it against a room she never got into.
When the tabernacle was built, the account pauses to name the workers, and the list is not what a modern reader expects. Engravers. Weavers. People who worked in blue and purple and scarlet. Embroiderers, named as makers of the holiest object that nation would ever carry.
What is easy to miss is where they worked. Not in a chamber. Outside, in a camp, among tents, with the wind in everything and children underfoot. The sacred work of that generation happened in the open air because there was nowhere else for it to happen.
Now look at your courtyard. Nine chairs in a loose ring, water in a jug on a low wall, a pot of something flowering that you moved in March so the afternoon shade falls right.
You have been doing the real work in the open air and calling it the second best option. Scripture says God filled skilled people with wisdom of heart for every kind of making, while the Holy Spirit is at work in a ring of nine chairs under the sky.
The Room You Are Measuring Against
Be exact about it, because you have been running a comparison for years without ever writing it down.
A planning room sits in a building about a mile from here. Long table, air conditioning, a screen on the wall. You were not on the group that met in it, for reasons that had to do with how the group was formed rather than with anything about you, and you have never quite got over it.
Since then, every time your circle goes well, some part of you notes that it happened in a courtyard. Every time somebody says something in your ring that they have never said to anybody, you file it as a good afternoon rather than as the work.
A room you were never in has been grading work it has never seen. The written Word calls skilled making a filling from God rather than a permission from a building, while the Holy Spirit is present outdoors as fully as He is anywhere with air conditioning.
That comparison is the whole problem, and it can end today, and it does not require one person from that room to say a word.
How That Group Was Formed, and Why It Stays Unsaid
There is a version of this that goes into the forming of it, and this is not that.
It would name the group and how it was formed. It would make the case, which you could make well, because you have had years to assemble it and you are good with detail. It would leave you heavier, more convinced, and still comparing.
That version also lands badly on the facts. Most groups form out of who happened to be in a corridor on the right afternoon, which is thin material for a charge and a very common source of one.
You can stop measuring against a room without prosecuting the people in it. Scripture rests your standing on what God has opened rather than on what anybody owes you, while the Holy Spirit takes weight off a person instead of handing them more.
Nothing here asks you to raise it, seek admission, or explain yourself to anyone. The courtyard gets lighter, and nobody else has to move first.
What the Courtyard Has That the Room Has Not
Look at your own ground honestly for a moment, because you have never given it a fair hearing.
The chairs are in a ring, so nobody is at the head. There is no screen, so nobody reads while somebody else is talking. There's a wall low enough to sit on when a tenth person arrives, which happens about once a month, and it costs nothing at all to include them.
People say true sentences out there. They say them because a courtyard is not a performance space and because the woman running it has never once made anybody feel assessed. That is not an accident and it is not the weather. It is the work you have been doing and refusing to count.
Count one part of it properly. You moved a pot in March so the shade would fall across the fourth and fifth chairs by half past three. Those are the seats people take when they arrive unsure and would rather be slightly out of the light.
Nobody in that ring knows the pot was moved for them. That is the whole point of it, and it is also why the work is invisible even to the woman doing it.
The place you have been apologizing for is the reason the work happens at all. The written Word calls the maker's skill a filling of wisdom from God, while the Holy Spirit does that filling without reference to what sort of room it gets used in.
Them Hath He Filled With Wisdom of Heart
There's a verse in Exodus about the people who built the tabernacle, and it says where a maker's ability comes from.
> Them hath he filled with wisdom of heart, to work all manner of work, of the engraver, and of the cunning workman, and of the embroiderer, in blue, and in purple, in scarlet, and in fine linen, and of the weaver, even of them that do any work, and of those that devise cunning work. > Exodus 35:35 (KJV)
Read the phrase about those who devise. Devise means design, work out, arrange. The people who thought about how a thing should be done are named alongside the ones who did it, and the filling covers both.
That's you, moving a pot in March so the afternoon shade falls right. Arranging nine chairs in a ring rather than rows. Deciding where the water goes. The account does not call that logistics. It calls it a filling of wisdom, from God, for the making of good work.
What is in your hands was put there, and no planning room was consulted about it. The written Word calls skilled devising a filling from God, while the Holy Spirit keeps it true in a courtyard with the wind in everything.
It is worth reading the list in that passage slowly, because of who is on it. The people who cut the stone are named. The people who wove are named. And the people who devised the work, who thought out how a thing should go together before anybody touched it, are named on exactly the same terms.
That is your job description, written down about three thousand years ago in a list of people God had filled. Nobody in that account is described as being in the room where it was decided. They are described as being filled, which happens to a person rather than to a meeting, and it goes with them out into whatever weather they are working in.
Declare this over yourself
You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so what follows is not a claim made out of your own authority. It is agreement, said back to God in His own words, while the Holy Spirit carries it. How He orders the rest of it is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own time.
Said by a woman already kept, from a keeping that began without her. What comes of the circle, and who sits in it, is God's.
What He opened is not closed by a planning room that has never seen an afternoon of my work. The written Word of God says He filled skilled people with wisdom of heart, naming those who devise the work beside those who do it. A room a mile away has been grading something it has never watched. The Holy Spirit is in this courtyard, in this ring of chairs, ahead of me rather than behind. This yard is where God set me, and being set is not trespass. I carry nothing bitter back across this yard. Both feet are on the ground, and the nine chairs are God's.
Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.
This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.
Exodus 35:35
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
