The House Key Under The Stone

It hangs on the fourth hook by the back door, the one nobody uses, and it has been there for nine years.

It is not their key. It belongs to the couple two doors up who go to their daughter's for three weeks every summer and who once, a long time ago, had a burst pipe while they were away and came home to a disaster.

After that they came round one evening with a bottle of something and asked if he would mind.

He said of course not. He took the key. He hung it on the fourth hook.

He has used it perhaps six times in nine years. Twice for post. Once when they thought they had left the oven on. Once for the boiler man.

Here is what happened last month, and it was nothing.

He was clearing out that hook because it had gathered the way hooks do, and he took the key off and stood there with it in his hand, and it took him a second to remember what it was for.

And then he did remember, and then something else arrived on top of it.

That couple sat in their car after the burst pipe and had a conversation about who on this street they could hand a key to. They will have gone through several names. And then they said his.

He has thought about that on and off ever since, because for nine years that key has been an item on a hook, and it started life as a verdict about the sort of man he is, and he had entirely stopped knowing that.

If something in your house has become an item, come and sit down in the hall. Nothing here is an alarm.

Sealed is a word about ownership and safety

There is a phrase in Ephesians that Paul uses in passing and which does a great deal of work.

In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit.Ephesians 1:13

A seal in that world was pressed into wax on a thing that mattered. It said two things at once and never one without the other. It said whose this is, and it said nobody opens this but the owner.

So the Spirit is described as the mark on you saying who you belong to and the guarantee that nothing gets at what has been sealed.

Now hold that next to a key on a hook.

You were chosen on purpose and you are sealed on purpose, and both of those are true this afternoon. Ephesians 1:13 puts the sealing on God's side and names the Holy Spirit as the seal itself, which means the safety of everything you are holding has never once depended on your remembering that you are holding it.

The choosing did not stop when you stopped noticing it

Now the second half, and it is the one to hear standing at a back door with a key in your hand.

Something was put into your hands because of a judgement somebody made about you. That is what nine years of a fourth hook has hidden, and it is nobody's fault, because a man clearing a hook is not in a position to feel the weight of a conversation held in a car park in a year he cannot name.

You were handed a real thing, and you are still holding it today. 2 Timothy 1:14 calls it a good deposit and names the Holy Spirit as the strength inside the keeping, which means what has gone quiet is your noticing rather than the thing itself.

And notice what is not on the list of what you were given. Not a feeling. A deposit is not an atmosphere. You can hold something perfectly on an afternoon when it means nothing to you, and a keeper who guards only what he currently feels is not a keeper.

And notice what the moment at the hook actually was. You have been shown this early, and you were shown it gently, and nothing has been broken. Romans 2:4 says it is the kindness of God that leads a person, and it is His Spirit who carries it at exactly the temperature a person can take, which is why it came as one thought about a key rather than a review of your whole character.

Now the half that makes the watching restful rather than nervous, because this site refuses to run the second without the first.

You are the one being kept, and that has been true every summer that key hung there unused. 1 Peter 1:5 says you are guarded by the power of God, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the guarantee, so the arrangement has never rested on how attentive you were being.

Both hands in this belong to God. He is holding what you entrusted to Him, and He is holding you while you hold what He entrusted to you. A man who thinks he is the only thing between a house and a burst pipe cannot rest, and you were never the only thing.