The Hymn Through the Boiler-Room Wall

For the believer who heard worship through a wall and felt themselves checking it.

You're in the boiler room on a Sunday evening bleeding a radiator, and you can hear singing through the wall.

It's the building next door, which shares a party wall with this one for about forty feet. Different tradition, different everything, and in eleven years the two congregations have managed a car park arrangement and nothing else.

The singing is good. Not polished, just full, the way a room sounds when most of the people in it mean it.

And you notice that you're listening to it in a particular way. Not enjoying it. Assessing it. Some part of you is running the sound through a check, the way you'd run a strange noise through a check before deciding whether the boiler is about to go.

That's the thing that stops you with the key still in the valve. Nobody else is here. There's no one to perform anything for. You are alone in a boiler room, on your knees, listening to people worship God through a wall, and you are checking them.

You can find the boundary you inherited in the way you listen when nobody is watching. The written Word says the Lord knows the ones who are His, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps that knowing where it was put.

The Check That Runs Without You

Here's what makes this hard to deal with by ordinary means.

It isn't a belief. If somebody asked you whether the people next door love God, you would say yes without hesitating, and you would mean it, and you would be slightly offended to be asked.

The check runs underneath the belief, and it runs faster. It's a suspicion installed early, out of tones, out of pauses, out of a few sentences somebody said about that building thirty years ago that you could not now quote and have never forgotten.

You cannot argue with it, because it never states anything you could argue with. It simply flavors the listening. And it is entirely invisible except on evenings like this one, alone, with a radiator key and forty feet of party wall.

The Seal on the Foundation

Here's Paul, writing to Timothy in a letter thick with worry about who was genuine:

Nevertheless the foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal, The Lord knoweth them that are his.2 Timothy 2:19 (KJV)

Read who does the knowing. Not Timothy, who is anxious and has good reason to be. Not Paul, who knew the individuals and had been proved right about several.

That verb belongs to the Lord. That's the seal on the whole foundation, and it is the one item in the letter neither man is asked to carry.

The checking belongs to God, and it was never handed to you or to anybody in that letter. The written Word makes His knowing the seal, and the Holy Spirit keeps it there rather than delegating it down a party wall.

A Wall Only Stops What You Can See

Here's what I'd carry out of that boiler room if I could take a single thing away with me.

The wall does its job perfectly for sight. You cannot see one face, one banner, one item of furniture, or one word of whatever is printed on the wall over there.

It does nothing at all for sound. Forty feet of brick, and the singing comes through it unfiltered, without any of the information your check normally runs on. No building, no name, no style you could place, nothing to sort by.

Which means what you're hearing through that wall is the one thing your inherited line was never built to handle: people worshipping God with every identifying mark removed. And the check still ran, on nothing, out of pure habit, in an empty room.

With every identifying mark stripped away, the check still ran on nothing. The written Word leaves the knowing with God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can retire a suspicion that operates on no evidence at all.

Nothing Here Settles Anything About Next Door

Let me be plain, because there's a version of this message that would do harm and I refuse to write it.

Nothing in this message decides who is in. That question has not been given to me, and a message that answered it would have replaced your inherited check with mine, which is no improvement to anybody.

Nor am I declaring that the door is open to all, which would be the same ruling reversed. That is the same act with a friendlier face, and it is still a man on his knees in a boiler room doing what the verse says God does.

You can stop running the check without issuing a verdict. Scripture hands the knowing back to God rather than reassigning it, and the Holy Spirit does the knowing rather than the reallocating.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.