Nobody Is Grading The House

You cleared the hall last Tuesday.

Twenty minutes, and it was not for anybody. Nobody was coming. There was no plan for anyone to see it and nobody has seen it since.

So who was it for?

That question is worth sitting with, because the honest answer is not nobody. It felt like it was for somebody. There was a sense of getting the room right, which implies a rightness, which implies somebody who would know the difference.

But when you go looking for that person, they are not there.

It is not your husband. He would not notice. It is not your mother, who is ninety miles away. It is not a friend, because none of them are coming.

There is an audience in your house and it is nobody, and it has been running your Tuesdays for years.

Let me deal with it, because an imaginary audience cannot be satisfied, cannot be dismissed, and never leaves.

I am not doing this to please anybody now

There is a question in Galatians that Paul asks about his own motives and then answers flatly.

For do I now persuade men, or God? or do I seek to please men? for if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ. (Galatians 1:10, King James Version)

Do I seek to please men. And the answer is that if he did, he would not be doing this at all.

The point of the question is that pleasing an audience and serving God are two different jobs with two different sets of instructions, and a person can only be doing one of them at a time.

You are performing for nobody, and that audience has never once been in the room. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a woman who cleared a hall for nobody last Tuesday, and Galatians 1:10 puts the audience question at the front and answers it in one sentence.

And notice that his audience was real. Yours is not.

Paul had actual people with actual opinions who would actually see. He still put the question down. You are doing the same job for people who do not exist, which is the same work with no possibility of a return.

You have been doing the work with no possibility of a return, and an audience that is not there has never once been able to be satisfied. The written word settles whose opinion is being served, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a woman who cannot name one person the Tuesday was for.

Who the audience actually is

Let me say something about who that audience is made of, because it is not nobody exactly.

It is an assembled thing. A bit of a mother. A bit of a woman whose house got visited twenty years ago. A bit of every picture of a home anybody has ever seen. All of it composited into a single imaginary observer with perfect attention and no name.

And that observer never leaves the room, has no other commitments, and misses nothing.

You have an observer with no name and perfect attention, and no real person has ever once been in the room like that. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a woman who has never once tried to identify her own audience, and Galatians 1:10 asks whose approval is being sought and treats it as the deciding question.

And here is why it cannot be argued away.

Real people can be talked to. You can find out that your husband genuinely does not mind, or that your friend's house is worse than yours, and the information lands.

You cannot tell an assembled observer anything. It does not receive information, because it is not a person, so twenty years of evidence has not touched it.

You have been offering evidence to something that cannot receive it, and no amount of evidence has ever once reached it. The written word does not argue with the audience, it simply changes who is being served, and the Spirit of God is the one who steadies a woman who has been presenting a case to nobody for two decades.

Performing for no one, deliberately

So here is tonight, and it is a performance in the opposite direction.

Leave one thing out on purpose, and go to bed, and let the imaginary observer see it.

You are performing something else for the same audience, and that audience has never once had any power to respond. The Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman leaving a book on a sofa and going upstairs, and Galatians 1:10 replaces the audience rather than persuading it.

And the reason this works when arguing does not is simple.

An assembled observer has no way to enforce anything. It has never once been able to do more than produce a feeling. Leave the thing out, feel the feeling, go to bed anyway, and the total power of the audience has been measured.

You are measuring the total power of something that has run your Tuesdays, and it has never once had more than a feeling. The written word changes the master rather than winning an argument, and the Spirit of God is the one present with a woman upstairs while a blanket stays on a sofa.