Not every visit to the room is vast or wordless. Some are small, ordinary, even a little funny. This one started with a Bible verse and ended, the very next night, with a joke.

I sat quietly, journal on my lap, pen in my hand, and asked the Holy Spirit to take me to the Inner Room to meet with Jesus. Moments later, that familiar room appeared before me, visible with the eyes of my heart.

❧

Night one, in the room.

“Hi Jesus. I love you.”

And I love you, Scot. My son and friend.

I smiled. This made me happy since I’d been reading in John that morning, the place where he told his disciples he no longer called them servants, but friends, because a servant doesn’t know his master’s business, and he had shared with them everything the Father had given him. I told him how grateful I was that he’d called me friend.

You’re welcome, he said. And I want to share the Father’s business with you too, Scot.

“Let me guess. That kind of sharing only happens in the secret place. The Inner Room.”

Yes. Of course. It’s all abiding in the vine.

“Of course. I’d have expected nothing less.”

That was the whole of it that night, brief, warm, and settled before I even had time to feel surprised by it. I was struck by the reality that Jesus wanted to share with me the Father’s business. What a wonderful thought. A friend, not just a servant tending to the master’s work.

❧

Night two, the following night. Same room, same opening.

“Hi Jesus. I love you.”

And I love you, Scot.

I admitted I’d only managed a page or two of journaling the night before, my wife wanted the lights out, and I hadn’t gotten far. Still, I brought up what he’d told me the night before, that it was here, in this room, that he shared his Father’s business with me.

That’s right, he said. You have to see and hear with spiritual eyes and ears if you’re going to see and hear what I want to show you. Otherwise I’m just talking to the wall.

I laughed. “That’s funny, Jesus.”

You used to find this kind of communication difficult, he said. Even fearful.

“Yes, I did. The thought of communicating with ‘the God of the universe’ was frightening.”

And now? What’s changed?

“Now it’s fun. Playful, even.”

I hesitated. Those words sounded strange in my ear. I was struck by how unreligious they sounded. A play date with God? What about ritual and the fasting and the long hours of prayer? Something had shifted underneath that phrase, something I was only now catching up to. None of this depended on me. Not on my goodness, my righteousness, my earnestness, or my piety. I didn’t have to fast for three weeks or pray for five hours to earn a moment of his attention. He had already paid for every bit of it, his death, his choice, the veil he tore so fellowship could be re-established without a mediator standing between us. I hadn’t opened this door and couldn’t have. All that was left for me to do was walk through it, and once that finally landed, walking through it stopped feeling like an assignment and started feeling like play.

What else? he asked. I know there’s more.

“I realized you weren’t mad at me, or disappointed, or waiting for me to get it wrong. I could just come and find you. I’m not chasing some rare, exotic experience that happens once in a blue moon. I’m coming for a play date.”

Indeed, he said. Love it. Tell others they can have a play date with me too.

“Good night, Lord.”

I’ve noticed something since. Both nights opened the exact same way, the same four words I use every time I come. It isn’t a different password for a different kind of visit. It’s the one door, opened the same way, whether what’s waiting on the other side is a lesson about friendship or an invitation to come play.

Subscribe now

The Anglican liturgy used for the Lord’s Supper has this wonderful phrase: “Feed on him in your heart by faith with thanksgiving.” Few who repeat this phrase realize that the “heart” referenced here—that place of feeding… that place of faith—is synonymous with the Inner Room, and even fewer ever take that call to enter earnestly. It’s just a passing phrase describing the Eucharist… nothing more.

The Inner Room is real. If you are ready, it’s time to find that place referred to as the “heart” and enter it that we might feed on him indeed. Today, I introduce one means of accessing that secret chamber within. Your expectations should be high: Christ is there, He is waiting for you, and He has something to say. Remember, the conversation has two sides… the idea that God is silent didn’t originate with God.

Listen now!

Peace & Grace,

Pastor Scot

Hi … Thanks for coming back. I have more to tell you.

My room has not changed in years. Long and rectangular, wooden walls, a plain wooden table down the center, benches on either side where we sit and talk and eat together. I know its shape the way I know the shape of my own house.

One day the far wall was different.

It had always simply been a wall. Now it was glass, floor to ceiling, side to side, the entire end of the room turned into a single window. I walked down to it and looked out.

The room sat high up inside something enormous. A structure rising like a great beehive, still under construction, layer stacked upon layer, reaching further than I could see in either direction. I understood, without being told, that this was the temple of God, still being built across the ages, waiting for the day of his descent to the earth.

My own room was one stone in that rising wall. One lit space among countless others, set into place the way each new soul is set into place, the whole structure climbing a little higher with every generation that comes to faith.

In a later visit, the window opened onto something else. A courtyard, vast, and across it, other rooms, lit from within. People inside them, sitting where I was sitting, looking out the way I was looking out. Some of them saw me. They waved.

I thought of the great cloud of witnesses, the ones who ran their race and are somehow still watching ours. I understood that the rooms remain long after the ones who occupied them have gone on, and that some of the people waving back at me that day were not gone at all, but very much alive, keeping the same appointment I was keeping, on some other ordinary evening of their own.

I did not ask a question that day. I did not write anything down until much later. I only stood at the glass for a long while, watching a temple still being built, and other lit windows, and hands raised in greeting from across a courtyard I had never known was there.

Subscribe now

It is worth pondering just how ordinary this is. The text does not present this as a rare visitation, a special appearance reserved for a momentous occasion. The wording suggests a rhythm already established, something the day was simply expected to include. God walked in the garden, and presumably, before the fruit, Adam walked out to meet him, the way one friend walks out to meet another at a familiar hour. Communion with God was not an event in Eden. It was the shape of an ordinary evening.

This changes how we should read what was actually lost when the fruit was eaten. We tend to think of the Fall primarily in terms of guilt, a moral debt now owed. That is true, but it is not the whole picture. Something rhythmic broke that day. Adam and Eve heard the familiar sound, the same footsteps they had likely welcomed a hundred evenings before, and this time they hid among the trees. The walk had not changed. God had not changed. Shame had entered, and shame does not want to be found. What had been the most natural part of the day became the thing to avoid.

Every believer who has ever wondered whether their prayers are landing anywhere, who has felt God to be distant or silent or simply hard to locate, is feeling the echo of that hidden place among the trees. This is not a modern problem invented by a distracted age. It is the oldest ache in the human story, the memory of a walk we were made for and somehow lost. Naming this plainly is not an accusation. It is closer to a diagnosis that finally makes sense of a feeling many believers have carried without ever having words for it.

Here is the good news buried in the text, and it is considerable. What Adam lost was not lost forever. Christ came, in part, to reopen exactly this. Where Adam once had a set hour and a set place, believers now carry something greater: an Inner Room, always open, requiring no particular time of day and no particular garden. What Eden offered on a schedule, in a location, Christ offers continually, from within. The exile was never the end of the story. It was the interruption before the greater restoration.

This is why the invitation at the center of the Christian life is so much simpler than religious systems have often made it sound. It does not require elaborate preparation, special knowledge, or a spiritual resume. It requires what Adam once did without a second thought: showing up. Walking out, the way you would walk toward the sound of someone you have missed.

The cool of the day still comes. The door is not hidden among the trees anymore, waiting to be avoided. It is open, and has been since Christ made it so. All that remains is the walk itself, ordinary, unhurried, and entirely yours to take.

Subscribe now

After the first dispatch, a few of you might reasonably assume that entering the Inner Room requires a notebook, a quiet morning, and decent handwriting. I want to widen that picture a little, because it widened for me too, and not entirely by choice.

I brought the question into the room one evening.

“Why isn’t journaling simply the way in? The one reliable door?”

It is not the primary way. It is not even the best way. It is one way among several.

“Then why does it feel so central to me?”

Because it fits a mind already used to putting thoughts on paper. That is not true of every mind, and it was not true of most believers who have ever lived.

I sat with that a moment.

Pen and paper have not always been in the hands of ordinary people. For most of the Church’s history, most who loved me could not read at all, let alone write down a conversation. If journaling were the true door, it would have been closed to nearly everyone who ever walked with me.

“So how did they come in?”

Some sat together in shady groves and simply spoke both sides of the conversation aloud. Others closed their eyes and watched, nothing written, nothing spoken, only sight. That was every bit as real as anything your pen has ever caught.

I told him I understood, though I admitted I still love the pen and the page, the record it leaves behind.

Keep it, then. It helps the soul remember what happened here. But do not mistake the record for the meal. What you write afterward is yesterday’s bread. Good for remembering. Not required for eating.

That exchange has stayed with me since. My journaling now feels less like the doorway itself and more like notes taken during a good conversation with an old friend, useful, but never the friendship.

If you attempted your first visit to the Inner Room via two-way journaling and found that your writing felt stiff, or nothing came, or the whole exercise sat flat on the page, I don’t think that means the door is closed to you. It might mean your door simply looks different than mine. Close your eyes sometime instead. Get quiet. Don’t reach for the pen. See what’s there.

Subscribe now

If you have been reading The Ember Blog for any length of time, you have already heard fragments of this teaching. The moné Jesus promised in John 14 as a dwelling place He goes to prepare. The Inner Room as a real interior space, not a metaphor. The Storehouse as a hidden vault of what heaven has prepared for you. The tripartite architecture of spirit, soul, and body, and why the spirit alone crosses certain thresholds. These threads have been running through the essays here for months. They have now been gathered into a book: The Return to the Inner Temple. And it now available on Amazon!

This new book draws from Scripture, from the mystics, and from years of watching people step across the threshold and find Christ waiting inside. It maps the invisible realms with as much care as I know how to bring, and it invites you into them not as a spectator but as a pilgrim.

Something has been lost in the modern Church. So many believers today are hungry for an interior life they were promised but never taught how to enter. They have sermons. They have programs. They have Scripture read aloud on Sunday. What they lack is the door. This book is an attempt to point to the door, and to help the reader find it open.

If you have found value in these Substack essays, the book is where the teaching goes deeper. And if you are willing, one thing would help enormously: an honest review on Amazon during launch week. Reviews are how new readers discover a book like this. A paragraph is enough. Whatever the book earns from you, in your own words.

Find the Book on Amazon

Through July 21st, the book is available at the reduced launch price of $10.00.

More than anything, though, my prayer is simple. May this book find the hands it was written for. May it help someone, somewhere, cross the threshold into the intimacy their soul was made for. That is what the whole project is for.

Subscribe now

I want to tell you about a room.

It’s not a metaphor, exactly, though it isn’t a place you could drive to either. I close my eyes, get quiet, and there it is: a long room with wooden walls, a plain wooden table down the center, benches on either side. Nothing grand. Nothing that would make a good painting. Just a room, and a table, and a place to sit.

I didn’t design it. I didn’t imagine it into existence the way you might daydream a beach house. It has taken the shape it has now over time, the way a room in your own house slowly fills in with furniture and habit until it feels like it was always that way.

The very first time I went looking, it wasn’t a room like this at all. The walls were mist, white and undefined, nothing solid enough to call a wall. The only thing clear in the whole scene was Jesus, standing at the center, speaking with an angel. When he noticed me, he turned, smiled, and took me by the arm.

Let’s walk and talk, he said.

That was the whole of it that day, an encounter more than a place, glory more than furniture. I was immediately reminded of the old hymn:

And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own;
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.

That room didn’t stay that way. Over time the mist gave way to something plainer and more permanent, this same long room with wooden walls and a wooden table, the kind of place you’d expect to find rather than a vision you’d expect to see. I’ve come to think that was not a lesser version of the first encounter, but a kinder one, the way overwhelming glory eventually settles into the steady comfort of a place you know how to walk into, already furnished by a relationship you didn’t have to build that morning.

I go there by doing something almost embarrassingly small. I open a notebook and write, “Hi, Jesus. I love you.” That’s the whole beginning. No incantation, no special posture, nothing that would look like anything if someone walked in on me doing it. And then, more often than not, something like an answer comes, and I write that down too. I love you too.

I’ve since watched other people try the same small thing, and it doesn’t always land the same way for everyone. Let me tell you about Phil. He was the outlier.

Phil belonged to a prayer group I was teaching, and journaling was on the agenda for the evening. We began with teaching, then moved to the actual task of writing down our flowing conversations with Jesus. There we were: journals open, soft music playing, everyone stilling their hearts before the Lord. After a few quiet moments, people began priming the pump with that same opening line, “I love you,” and hearing something answer back, I love you too. Pens started moving. Slowly at first, then faster, everyone finding a rhythm they hadn’t expected to find so quickly. When we shared afterward, the room was full of quiet astonishment. Everyone had written something. Everyone but Phil.

“I got nothing,” he said. Then, wanting to be sure he understood what we were even claiming, he asked it plainly. “Am I hearing you right? That the conversation I’m writing down is actually me talking to Jesus, and Jesus talking back to me?”

“Yes, Phil. That’s exactly right.”

The room was already excited, and Phil’s question, and the honesty behind it, only added a little more courage to the air. People wanted a second try. We stilled ourselves again and picked our pens back up. Phil tried again too, slower this time, hesitant, but resolute. He wrote his opening line and waited. After a while, he wrote something down. Then, after a while longer, something else.

When our time was up, we shared again. Phil went last. He opened his journal and read what his own pen had written.

“I love you, Lord Jesus.”

I love you too, Phil.

“I have a big question.”

Go ahead, Phil. Ask it.

“Is this really you, Lord Jesus?”

Yes, this is really me.

I laughed for an evening over that one, not because it was silly, but because it was so unguarded, so exactly what a person actually needs to ask the first time.

I don’t have a tidy explanation for how any of this works, and I’m suspicious of anyone who claims they do. What I can tell you is that Scripture has always assumed something like this room exists. Paul talks about Christ dwelling in us. Jesus talks about making his home with anyone who loves him. I used to read those as lovely ideas, true in some abstract sense, the way we say a country lives in our hearts on a holiday. I don’t read them that way anymore. I think he meant an actual dwelling, an actual room, and an actual invitation to come sit down.

That’s all this first dispatch is, really. Not a lesson, not a method, just a door, and a small true thing that happened when I walked through it. There will be more rooms, more conversations, more strange and ordinary things to report back. For now, I just wanted you to know the room is there.

Subscribe now

The posts that follow in this section will not read like a devotional or a doctrine. These are reports. (The term “dispatch” comes from wartime reporting, sending updates from the frontlines back to those at home.) These dispatches are thus firsthand accounts of what happens when an ordinary believer stops trying to reach God and simply goes to the place He already prepared. Before any of those stories land, it is worth naming what that place is and how a person actually gets there.

Jesus said He was going to prepare a place for us in His Father’s house. Most of us were taught to read that as a promise about heaven someday. And though the Father will surely receive us into heavenly lands of promise one day, Jesus was speaking about something much nearer. The Greek word behind “place,” moné, means a dwelling, a chamber built for permanence rather than a stop along the way. (This speaks of habitation over visitation.) Jesus used the same word again a few verses later when He said that anyone who loves Him will be one in whom the Father and the Son will make their home. The “home” that Jesus refers to here cannot be in the afterlife — for the home God makes in us is clearly meant for the living.

Let’s widen our vista here for a moment. Scripture tells us that Jesus prepared this place that where He is, we might also be. Such news is Good News — and it lets us understand that God’s choice to make His home in the believer was not meant to wall Himself off from us — but rather, He came to live within us that we might have intimate fellowship with Him — in that secret place — the chamber within — the Inner Room. In short, the “home” that God makes in you is also the “chamber” He has prepared for you to commune with Him.

So, we have thus come to call this the Inner Room. It is not a technique or a trick of the mind. It is a relationship, and like any relationship, it has a door.

The door opens through the spirit, not the soul. Most of us live from the soul most of the day, which is the part of us that reasons, plans, and feels. The soul is not the enemy here, but it was never meant to lead. The spirit is the part of you built to commune directly with God, and for most believers the human spirit has gone quiet from disuse. Entering the Inner Room begins with waking it up. This is not manipulation. It is an invitation, spoken plainly, to the neglected part of yourself: rise, and lead.

From there, the practice is almost embarrassingly simple. Find a place where you will not be interrupted. Grow still. Ask the Holy Spirit, in the name of Jesus, to lead you to the dwelling Christ has already prepared. Then wait, and let whatever comes, come. Some people see a room. Some see a garden, a river, a stretch of open field. Some see very little at first, only a sense of warmth or nearness. None of that is failure. The Inner Room is shaped by how intimately God knows you, so no two people find the same door, and no one gets there by following someone else’s map.

The hardest part is usually not the entering. It is the doubting afterward. The soul will ask whether you made it up. This is worth saying plainly: if what you perceived carried peace, lined up with what Scripture reveals about the character of God, and drew you toward Him rather than away, trust it. The remedy for doubt is not analysis. It is returning. Go back again. The second time is clearer than the first. The tenth time becomes a rhythm, and eventually a home.

This is the ground the Dispatches are written from. What you will read in the entries ahead are not proofs or arguments for any of this. They are simply what happened when someone went to the door, found it open, and stepped through. The first one is coming next week, and it begins, fittingly enough, with fear giving way to something far better.

Subscribe now

Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Share

For years I’ve kept a habit of two-way journaling, sitting with Jesus in what I’ve come to call the Inner Room, the secret place Scripture points to when it speaks of abiding in the vine. What happens there isn’t theory. It’s encounter. And for just as long, I’ve told myself these moments were too private, too strange, too personal to put in front of anyone but myself.

Well, I’ve changed my mind. Peter stood up on the day of Pentecost and told a confused crowd that dreams and visions were never meant for a rare few. They were promised to sons and daughters, young and old, ordinary people just like the ones gathered in front of him. I think we lost something when the Church settled for information over encounter, and I want to help recover a little of what we lost, one dispatch at a time.

Here is what you can expect from this space. Some dispatches will come from the Inner Room itself, the place of intimate fellowship with Christ. Others will come from what I call the Storehouse, the vault of provision hidden within the spiritual body, where God has already stored what we need for life and godliness (2 Peter 1:3). A few will come from stranger country still, frontiers I don’t have a tidy name for, where the war behind the war is fought and, sometimes, mercifully won. This is Second Heaven territory.

Not all of these dispatches will be mine. Others in our own fellowship have begun offering their own accounts, and in time you’ll read theirs alongside mine. Names and details are changed throughout to protect the people these stories belong to. What stays true is the substance, what God did, what was seen, what changed.

Consider this an open invitation into a way of walking with Christ that is available to every one of us, not reserved for the mystically inclined. Dispatch #1 begins next.

Subscribe now

I had to stop her gently. Not because the Apocrypha needs defending. But because the history she had inherited was wrong, and she deserved to know the truth of it.

Here is what your great-great-grandfather’s Bible looked like.

The King James Bible, first printed in 1611, contained eighty books. Not sixty-six. Eighty. Tucked between the Old and New Testaments was a collection of writings known as the Apocrypha, books like Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, and First and Second Maccabees. These were not Catholic additions. They were not smuggled in by Rome. They were simply part of the Bible as English-speaking Protestants received it, read it, and passed it down for generation after generation.

For two hundred and seventy-four years, the King James Bible included these books. The Pilgrims who crossed the Atlantic carried them. The Puritans who shaped early American religious life read them. The great-great-grandparents of the woman in my congregation owned a Bible that contained every one of them. This was not a Catholic Bible. It was the Protestant Bible, the only Bible most English-speaking believers had ever known.

So what happened?

In 1826, the National Bible Society of Scotland sent a petition to the British and Foreign Bible Society. The request was straightforward and entirely practical: stop printing the Apocrypha. The reasoning had nothing to do with theology. It had nothing to do with the authority of the texts, their inspiration, or their doctrinal content. The reasoning was this: printing fewer pages made Bibles cheaper to produce, and cheaper Bibles could reach more people.

It was a cost-benefit analysis. A ledger decision. The British and Foreign Bible Society agreed, and from that point forward their funds would no longer support the printing of Apocryphal books anywhere. By 1885, the Apocrypha had been formally removed from English Bible printings. Two hundred and seventy-four years after the original King James Bible had included them, they were gone.

Not because a council of theologians had studied the question and reached a considered conclusion. Not because new evidence had emerged about the texts themselves. Not because the Church had discerned, after careful prayer and reflection, that these books did not belong. They were removed because binding and printing one hundred extra pages cost money, and the societies distributing Bibles needed to keep costs down.

A printer’s financial decision became, within a generation or two, evangelical doctrine.

Here is how quickly myth hardens into certainty. Within decades of the removal, Protestants had begun calling these books “Catholic additions.” The accident became tradition. The tradition became conviction. The conviction became the kind of settled, unquestioned assumption that gets passed down in congregations without anyone ever stopping to ask where it came from. By the time the woman in my congregation made her comment, she was not expressing a theological position she had studied and embraced. She was repeating a story that had been told to her as fact, a story that had its roots not in Scripture, not in Church history, not in theological discernment, but in a nineteenth-century printing budget.

This is worth sitting with. Not because the Apocrypha’s place in the canon needs to be relitigated here. That is a genuine and complex question, and it is not the point of this post. The point is something simpler and more unsettling: how much of what we hold as ancient and settled turns out, under examination, to be surprisingly recent and surprisingly accidental?

The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, as we have been exploring over at Arrow Song, was written in 1978. The Apocrypha was removed from Protestant Bibles in 1885. The doctrine that every home should have a Bible, and that Christianity depends on access to one, is a twentieth-century invention born of the printing press. Layer by layer, what feels like the eternal and unchanging shape of the faith turns out to have a history, a specific, dateable, often quite mundane history.

None of this should shake your faith. If anything, it should deepen it. Because the foundation was never the canon as currently printed, never the doctrinal statement signed in a Chicago hotel, never the edition of the Bible on your nightstand. The foundation is Christ. And Christ was the foundation long before any of these decisions were made, and He will remain the foundation long after every human institution that has gathered around His name has come and gone.

What the woman in my congregation needed to hear was not a lecture on the Apocrypha. It was a reminder that our tradition is human, that human things have human histories, and that knowing those histories honestly is not a threat to the faith. It is a gift to it.

The book has a story. It is a remarkable story, full of faithful transmission and providential preservation across the centuries. But it is a human story, carried by human hands, shaped by human decisions, some of them theological and some of them financial. Knowing that does not diminish Scripture. It restores it to its proper place, as the sacred, Spirit-carried witness to the One who stands behind it, before it, and infinitely beyond it.

Hold the book humbly. And hold the One it points to with everything you have.

Subscribe now

We want to suggest something different. Those moments were not anomalies. They were your spirit going home.

In Episode 7, we begin mapping what we are calling the interior country — the spiritual landscape within the believer that most of us were never taught to navigate. We look at what Scripture says about the mobility of the human spirit, why Peter and Joel declared dreams and visions to be the hallmark of the entire Church Age, and we place two specific destinations on the map: the Inner Room and the Storehouse.

This is the opening of a longer arc. Today we lay the foundation and take the first steps.

Come explore with us.

Peace & Grace,

Pastor Scot

In most churches, communion works like a cafeteria line. The congregation forms a queue and shuffles forward, row by row, to receive the bread and the cup from someone standing behind a table at the front of the room. It is orderly. It is efficient. It moves a large number of people through a sacred act in a reasonable amount of time. And it communicates, without anyone intending it to, that grace flows from the periphery toward the center — that the people must come to the Table rather than the Table coming to the people.

Nobody designed this to make a theological statement. It simply evolved as the most practical solution to a logistical problem. But the room encodes the theology before anyone speaks, and this particular encoding reverses the direction of the gospel.

The gospel does not summon the hungry to form an orderly line. The gospel goes out.

Here is a different picture. Imagine the elders taking the bread and the cup from the Table at the center of the room and moving outward — not waiting for the congregation to come to them, but going to the congregation where they stand. Moving through the room, offering what they carry to each person in turn. Kneeling if necessary. Pausing. Looking the person in the eye. Placing the bread in their hands.

Grace moves from the center toward the periphery. The shepherd goes to the sheep. The feast comes to the guest.

This is not a liturgical novelty. It is a recovery of the oldest instinct of the gospel. Jesus did not tell the hungry crowds to form a line. He took five loaves and two fish, gave thanks, broke them, and sent the disciples out through the crowd until everyone had eaten. The feast moved. The bread went to the people. That is the direction grace travels.

Behind the elders, in this vision, come the prayer ministers — moving through the same room, laying hands gently on those who have just received, praying quietly over each person as the Spirit leads. The two ancient acts of the Church — Eucharist and anointing — held together in a single movement through the Body. James 5 and 1 Corinthians 11 in the same moment. Healing and remembrance. Presence and participation.

No line. No queue. No management of the sacred from behind a table. Elders moving as servants, bringing what they carry to each person in turn.

The picture this creates in the room is worth sitting with.

The congregation is standing within the surrounding worship environment we described in Part 2 — inside the music, inside the imagery, no stage, no front wall. The Table is at the center. And now the bread and the cup are moving outward from that center like light from a source — elders carrying the feast through the gathered Body, prayer following in their wake.

This is the Body functioning as it was designed. Not an audience receiving from a stage. Not a queue shuffling toward a table. A gathered community of Spirit-filled believers, each of whom came full from their own Inner Room, standing together in the presence of God while the elders move among them with the bread that says: He gave Himself for you. He is still giving Himself for you. He has not stopped.

This five-part series has been about unbuilding — dismantling the assumptions that accumulated around gathered worship over the centuries until the room no longer said what we believe. The stage that made us an audience. The Table pushed to the side. The children sent away. The teacher elevated above the people. The feast administered from behind a barrier.

We are not innovating. We are remembering. Every element of this vision is older than the model it replaces, rooted in Scripture, practiced in the early Church, and waiting to be recovered by a community willing to ask: what does the room confess?

At The Furnace, we are asking. And we like what the answers are beginning to look like.

Subscribe now

The pulpit is not neutral furniture.

It is a piece of architecture that makes a theological claim before a single word is spoken. It places one person above all the others. It faces the congregation from a height. It signals, as clearly as any creed or confession, that truth flows in one direction — downward, from the platform toward the people — and that the job of the people is to sit still and receive it.

We inherited this model. We did not choose it so much as find it already in place when we arrived. Most of us have sat in those rows since childhood, facing forward, taking notes, absorbing what the person at the front had prepared for us. It feels natural because it is all we have ever known. It feels sacred because it is where we first heard the Word of God proclaimed. And the proclamation of the Word is sacred — nothing in what follows should be heard as a dismissal of that.

The pulpit is not the only way. It is not even the oldest way. And it carries theological freight that we should at least examine before we assume it is the only faithful option.

Jesus did not use a pulpit.

He walked. He sat among His disciples on hillsides and in boats and around tables. He asked questions as often as He gave answers. He paused beside one person and then moved to another. He drew the room into the inquiry rather than delivering conclusions to it from above. His teaching was participatory — not in the sense of being unstructured or without authority, but in the sense that wisdom was sought together rather than dispensed from a height.

The Socratic tradition understood this. The great teachers of the ancient world did not stand still. They moved among their students. The movement was not incidental. It was pedagogical. A teacher who moves through the room signals something the pulpit cannot: wisdom belongs to the gathering, not to the platform.

Paul’s letters are full of this instinct. When he writes to the Corinthians about the gathered Body, he describes a community where each person brings something — a hymn, a teaching, a word of revelation, a tongue, an interpretation. Let all things be done for edification. The gathering is not a delivery system for one person’s preparation. It is a community of Spirit-filled believers, each carrying what the Spirit has given, contributing to the whole.

The teacher among them is not above them. The teacher is the one who draws out what is already there.

At The Furnace, we are moving toward a model of teaching that looks more like this. The teacher moves through the congregation as he teaches — pausing near one person, addressing another, asking a question and waiting for the room to answer. Not because we are abandoning depth or rigor or the serious engagement with Scripture. Because we believe the Spirit has already been at work in the room before the teaching begins, and that good teaching finds what the Spirit has placed there rather than talking over it.

This recovers something that was present in the early Church and in the teaching of Jesus. It is not informality. It is fidelity to the oldest model of all — the Rabbi who moved among His people, who taught from within rather than from above, who trusted that the Kingdom of God was already present in the room and that His job was to draw it out.

The teacher who moves is not being casual. He is being faithful.

And when he steps down from the platform — or better yet, when there is no platform to step down from — the room changes. The congregation is no longer an audience. They are participants. They are the Body. And the teaching that emerges from among them carries a weight that no performance from above can replicate.

Subscribe now

At The Furnace, the children stay.

There is no children’s church. There is no parallel program running in a separate room while the adults do the real thing. There is no age-sorted environment designed to manage young bodies away from the gathered Body. When we come together, we come together — all of us, from the oldest to the youngest, in the same room, for the same gathering, around the same Table.

This surprises people. It surprises them because the alternative has become so deeply normal that most believers have never stopped to ask where it came from. Children’s church feels ancient. It feels like it must have roots somewhere deep in the tradition. Surely the early Church did this. Surely there is a scriptural precedent.

There is not.

The segregation of children from the worshipping body has no precedent in Scripture and no root in the early Church. It is a modern invention, born not of theology but of institutional convenience — a practical solution to the logistical problem of young bodies in a room designed for passive observation. When the church became a theater, children became a disruption. The solution was to give them their own theater down the hall.

We did not do this to harm them. We did it to manage them. The distinction matters, but the result is the same either way. A generation has grown up alongside the Church rather than inside it — attending their own version of church, learning their own simplified curriculum, watching their own age-appropriate presentation — and then aging out of that system into an adult congregation they have never actually inhabited.

Here is what a child receives when they stay.

They watch an elder move through the room carrying bread and a cup, kneeling beside their parent, offering what he carries with quiet reverence. They watch hands laid gently on a bowed head. They watch someone weep in the presence of God, or lift their hands, or stand very still with their eyes closed and their face turned upward. They hear singing that is not performed at them but arises from the people around them. They sit beside adults who are genuinely encountering something real — and they feel it, even if they cannot name it.

This is formation. Not information — formation. The kind that happens not through curriculum but through presence. Through proximity to something true. Through inhabiting the Body of Christ rather than watching a child-sized version of it from a safe distance.

Jesus did not send the children away. When the disciples tried to manage them — tried to protect the important adult business of the Kingdom from the disruption of small bodies — Jesus stopped them. Let the children come to me. Do not hinder them. The Kingdom of God belongs to such as these. He did not say: take them down the hall and give them a simplified version of what we are doing here. He said: let them come.

There is a practical reality to acknowledge. Children are not silent. They move. They ask questions at inconvenient moments. They drop things. A gathered community that includes children looks and sounds different from one that does not, and the difference requires patience, flexibility, and a willingness to let the gathering be slightly less polished than it might otherwise be.

This is not a cost to be minimized. It is a feature of the gathered Body functioning as it was designed. A room full of only adults who sit quietly and listen in rows is not the Body of Christ at full expression. It is a subset of it, carefully curated for maximum efficiency.

The full Body is messier. It includes the very old and the very young, the composed and the restless, the ones who have words for what they are experiencing and the ones who do not yet.

The children were always supposed to be here. Let them stay.

Subscribe now

Here is a question worth sitting with before you read any further: When you walk into your church on Sunday morning, what is at the center of the room?

Not what is at the front. Not what is elevated. What is at the center — the gravitational heart of the space, the thing the room is arranged around, the object that everything else points toward or defers to?

In most contemporary churches, the honest answer is the stage. Or the pulpit. Or the screen. Or the band. Something that directs the eye toward a gifted human being and signals, before a single word has been spoken, that you have come to receive from one person what that person has prepared for you. The architecture confesses a theology. The question is whether it is the theology you actually believe.

We are in the early stages of dreaming about what a gathered space for The Furnace might one day look like. And the first decision — the one that shapes everything else — is this: what goes at the center?

For us, the answer is the Table.

Not the stage. Not the pulpit. Not the screen. The Table of the Lord — the Communion Table — at the gravitational heart of the room, visible from every point in the space, the thing the room is arranged around. Whatever occupies the center of a room is what the room confesses matters most. If the Table is at the center, the room says, before anyone speaks, before the music begins, before the teaching starts: this is why we are here. Not to watch. Not to be entertained. To eat and drink together in the presence of the One who gave Himself for us.

The Eucharist is not a concluding ritual appended to the real event. It is the reason the room exists. When the Table is at the center, the architecture confesses this before the gathering begins.

We are also dreaming about four walls, four screens, and no front.

Imagine a room where the congregation stands inside a continuous environment of image and lyric that wraps the entire space. There is no stage. There is no direction the room points except inward, toward one another, and upward, toward God. Wherever you stand, you are equally inside the worship. You are not facing it from a distance. You are not observing it from the cheap seats. You are standing within it.

This is not an aesthetic preference. It is ecclesiology made physical. The room says: there is no performer here. You have not come to watch. You have come to enter in.

If there is a band, the musicians are scattered throughout the space. The music does not come from a platform toward the people. It arises from within the room itself — surrounding, atmospheric, indistinguishable from the gathered body. The congregation is not an audience. It is a source.

None of this is innovation. Every element of this vision is older than the model it replaces.

The early Church gathered in homes, in catacombs, around tables. There were no stages. There were no platforms. There was no separation between the people who performed the sacred acts and the people who watched them performed. The Table was at the center because the meal was the center. The bread was broken among the people, not dispensed to them from above.

We did not lose this overnight. It drifted away from us gradually, one architectural compromise at a time, until the room we built no longer said what we believed. We are not trying to innovate. We are trying to remember.

A room that puts the Table at the center and wraps the congregation inside the worship is not a modern experiment. It is a very old confession, recovered.

The room itself can be an act of faith. Let ours say what we mean.

Subscribe now

There is an old quip about Sunday morning church that is funny because it is true: the ministers minister and the congregation congregates. The professionals perform. The people watch. It is, when you strip away the sacred language and the good intentions, a spectator sport.

Nobody designed it that way on purpose. Nobody sat down in the sixteenth century and said, let us build a system that turns the Body of Christ into an audience. It happened gradually, incrementally, one architectural decision at a time. The stage went up. The seats all faced forward. The lights separated the performers from the observers. The green room appeared. And somewhere in that slow drift, the gathered Body of Christ began to look remarkably like a theater — with a cast, a crew, and a crowd.

The problem is not the people. The people are hungry, sincere, and doing exactly what the room tells them to do. The problem is this: the room has already decided your role before the service begins. And the solution is not a better program or a more dynamic speaker or a worship band with more lights. The solution begins before anyone arrives.

Here is what we have been learning at The Furnace, slowly and wonderfully, over these past months.

When each person comes to the gathering already full — already having spent time in the Inner Room, already having listened for the voice of God in the quiet of their own interior — the meeting becomes something entirely different. It stops being a performance and starts being a chorus. Not a chorus where everyone sings the same note, but a chorus where everyone has been listening to the same Composer and arrives with their own part already learned.

We call this the “alone first, together second” rhythm. You go into your Inner Room. You sit with Christ. You listen. You let His word find you in the silence of your own soul. And then you come together — and what you bring is not an empty cup hoping to be filled. You bring what you have already received, and you discover that everyone else has been receiving too.

This is not theoretical for us. Not long ago, in one of our gatherings, two people shared what they had been hearing from Jesus during the week. One had been sitting with the image of the flowers of the field — how God clothes them in glory beyond anything Solomon achieved. Another had been sitting with the birds of the air — how God feeds them and they do not spend their days in anxiety. Two people. Two separate weeks of listening. Two fragments.

Together, they were one verse. Complete.

That is what happens when people come full. The gathering becomes the place where what God has been saying to each of us privately is confirmed and amplified in the company of one another. The congregation does not come to receive what the minister has prepared. The congregation comes to share what God has already given — and the minister, moving among them, draws out what the Spirit has already placed in the room.

This reframes everything about what Sunday morning is for.

It is not the weekly download. It is not the place where spiritually depleted people come to be topped up by a talented communicator before heading back into the week. It is the overflow. It is what happens when a community of people who have been living from the Inside Out all week finally get to be together and discover that the God who spoke to each of them individually has been telling the same story to all of them.

The spectator sport ends the moment the congregation stops coming empty.

You cannot mandate this. You cannot program it. You cannot produce it with better production values or a more carefully crafted sermon series. It grows from the Inner Room, one person at a time, as each member of the Body learns to come to the gathering not as a consumer but as a carrier — full of what God has given, ready to offer it to the rest.

But the congregation cannot do this alone. The room must want it too. The leadership must build space for it — resisting the impulse to fill every silence, leaving room in the gathering for what the Spirit has already placed in the people. A tightly programmed service has no place to put what you carry in. The architecture, the order of worship, the posture of the elders — all of it must signal the same thing the Inner Room already knows: you are not here to watch. You are here to bring.

This is what the rest of this series is about. Come full. And then let us talk about what kind of room is worthy of what you carry.

More in Part 2… next week.

Subscribe now

Most believers spend their prayer lives reaching upward toward a God who feels distant — praying harder, fasting longer, hoping to finally break through. But Ephesians 2:6 says you are already seated with Christ in the heavenly places. You are not fighting for a position. You are enforcing one.

In this episode, we visit Mount Carmel — where the prophets of Baal danced, shouted, and cut themselves trying to wake a god who never answered — and we ask the uncomfortable question: is that how we pray? Then we turn to Elijah, who simply spoke to a God who was already listening, already present, already inclined toward His servant. The difference was not volume or intensity. It was the nature of the God being addressed.

God is not distant. He is not waiting to be impressed. He made His home inside of you so that He would never have to be reached for again.

Also from Pastor Scot: the Kingdom Architecture Podcast. We recommend starting with Episode 1 — each episode builds directly on the one before it. Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, and iHeartRadio.

Subscribe now

Christianity without the props is not Christianity stripped bare and impoverished, a faith reduced to its minimum, limping along without its proper supports. It is Christianity returned to its native richness, the richness that was always interior, always personal, always unconfiscatable. The props, the buildings, the Bibles, the liturgies, the clergy, the gatherings, are not the enemy. Misplaced trust in them is. And the difference between those two things is everything.

Here is the truth that changes everything: you are the temple of the living God. Not the building down the street. Not the sanctuary with the stained glass and the oak pews. You. Your body is the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, and the Kingdom of God is not coming with observation; it is already within you (Luke 17:21). The Inner Room that Jesus describes in John 14 is not a metaphor for a quiet hour in the morning. It is a real place, a permanent place, a place that exists inside every believer regardless of circumstance, geography, or access to religious resources.

This is the unconfiscatable inheritance. No emperor can reach it. No dictator can burn it. No poverty can price you out of it. The persecuted believer in a North Korean labor camp, who has never held a Bible and has not seen another Christian in years, has the same Inner Room available to her as the seminary professor surrounded by his library. The martyrs of Rome went to their deaths singing not because they were especially brave but because they possessed something death could not touch. They had learned to live from the inside out. They had found the Inner Room—the Inner Temple not made by human hands. This is where it begins.

And yet we are not meant to live only alone. We are also a Body. Paul does not use that image casually; he means it structurally and literally. We are the hands and feet of Christ in the world, and hands and feet belong to a body, not scattered across the floor. When two or three gather in the name of Jesus, something real and distinct happens, not merely individuals in the same room, but a corporate expression of the temple of God. The gathered community, the shared table, the worship offered together, these are not optional accessories to the faith. They are the faith expressing itself in its fullness.

The props can serve this corporate reality beautifully. A building gives the Body a place to gather. A liturgy gives the Body a shared language. A Bible read aloud in community has fed the Church for two thousand years. None of these things are wrong. The question is only whether they are in their proper place, serving the Interior life, pointing toward Christ, facilitating the union that is the real substance of everything.

When the props are mistaken for that substance, something quietly goes wrong. And the sign that it has gone wrong is not always obvious, because it often looks like devotion.

Here is the test I find clarifying. Imagine the emperor makes his decree: Bibles confiscated, clergy imprisoned, gatherings forbidden. If your faith depends on those things, the emperor wins. But if the Interior is alive and real, if the Kingdom truly is within you, then everything the emperor cannot reach is still everything that matters. The props are gone and what remains is still the whole of Christianity, because what remains is Christ Himself, dwelling within.

This is not a theoretical exercise. It is the lived reality of the underground church in China, the persecuted believers in North Korea, the martyrs in every century who discovered that when everything external was stripped away, what they had on the inside was more than enough.

Subscribe now

The rhythm that makes all of this work, both the individual Interior life and the corporate gathering, is what I would call alone first, together second.

You go into your Inner Room. You sit with Christ. You listen. You let His heart become your heart and His word become your word. And then you come together with the Body, and here is the wonder of it. When each person has genuinely been in their Inner Room, hearing from God, they bring something real to the gathering. And God, it turns out, tends to say the same thing to all of us, even if in different words, different images, different fragments of the same truth.

Last week in our gathering, someone shared what they had been hearing from Jesus, something about the flowers of the field, how God clothes them in glory. Another person, who had been sitting in their own Inner Room all week, shared something different: the birds of the air, how God feeds them and they do not worry. Two people. Two separate encounters with Christ. Two fragments.

Together: one verse, whole and complete.

That is the Body functioning as it was designed. That is what happens when people come to the gathering already full rather than coming empty and hoping to be filled. The corporate experience becomes not a substitute for the personal one but an amplification of it, a chorus of voices that have each been listening alone, now finding that they have all been hearing the same song.

The props have their place. Use them. Love them. But know what they are for.

They are scaffolding, not the building. They are the banks of the river, not the water. They are the means by which the Interior life finds its corporate expression and the corporate Body is pointed back toward the Interior life of each of its members.

Christianity without the props is simply Christianity as it was always meant to be, rooted so deeply in the presence of Christ within that nothing from without can diminish it, and so fully alive in the gathered Body that when two or three come together in His name, He is there in their midst.

That is more than enough. It always has been.

Subscribe now

This logic is called a syllogism, and it dates back to ancient Greece. The idea is simple. The syllogism draws a conclusion from two premises that are assumed to be true. For example, humans are mortal, Aristotle is human, therefore Aristotle must be mortal. Easy enough. The logic generally holds as long as both premises are true. Should one or the other not be true, then the syllogism produces nonsense. For example, dogs have four legs, that animal has four legs, therefore that animal is a dog (meow). It is easy to see that the premises must be universally true for the logic game to work.

To apply this kind of logic to the Christian faith is disastrous. Christian truth is not ascertained by logic or thought or even empirical observation. Rather, it is by revelation that we know the truth of God, His Son, and His kingdom. When we reach for the tool kit of logic, we are in for troubled seas. The theology rising from such methodology is catastrophic.

Back to the coffee shop: what my peers have done, without realizing it, is collapse the Author into the book. They have taken the living Person—the one John describes in the opening of his Gospel as the Word who was with God and was God, the Word through whom all things were made—and flattened Him into a printed text. (If the concept of Jesus as the Logos is new to you, I explored it in depth here.) Jesus is not a document. He is a Person. And confusing those two things is not a small mistake. It borders on heresy.

Here is something worth sitting with: Jesus wrote nothing. Not one word. He left no manuscript, no scroll, no letter. The apostles left a record behind—a breathtaking, Spirit-carried, utterly indispensable record—but the One they were recording chose not to write a single line. The New Testament is the testimony of those who walked with Him, were transformed by Him, and were carried along by the Holy Spirit as they bore witness to what they had seen and heard. The Bible is the record of our history with God. It is the account of a living relationship, written by godly men and women as the Spirit moved them. It is sacred beyond measure, but it is a witness, not the One witnessed.

This matters more than it might seem at first.

Here is a test I find clarifying. Imagine a dictator in the mold of Diocletian—or look at North Korea today, or the underground church in China. The emperor makes his decree: Bibles are confiscated and burned. Clergy are imprisoned. Churches are shuttered. Christian gatherings are forbidden.

If Christianity depends on the book, the clergy, and the building, then the faith dies when those things are removed. The emperor wins.

But Christianity has never actually worked that way—even if we have sometimes acted as though it did. For nearly two thousand years, the average believer could not read. Bibles were rare, housed in the hands of a few bishops or scholars. There was no printing press, no hotel nightstand copy, no pew Bible. And yet the Church spread. Martyrs went to their deaths singing. The faith multiplied under every empire that tried to crush it.

Why? Because what the martyrs possessed could not be confiscated. Jesus had told them plainly: The Kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:21). The apostle John had assured his readers that they had received an anointing from the Holy One and had no need that any man should teach them (1 John 2:27). Jesus Himself had said: Abide in Me—not study about Me, not accumulate correct doctrine about Me, but abide. The invitation was always interior. It was always relational. It was always to a Person.

Tertullian, writing in the third century, said that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. That is not a statement about institutional resilience. It is a statement about what happens when people are so thoroughly abiding in Christ that death cannot threaten what they most deeply possess.

None of this is a case against the Bible. I love the Scriptures. I have given my life to what they contain and what they point toward. The proper place of Scripture is high and honored—but it is a specific place. Don’t praise the pointing finger and ignore the glorious light of the moon, since that misses the very point of the signpost. Don’t frame the love letter and worship it—go to the person it came from. And don’t worship the map; use it to find your way to the treasure buried in the field.

When the Bible becomes the destination rather than the direction, something has gone quietly wrong. Sadly, the sign that something has gone wrong is not always obvious, because it often looks like devotion and sounds like reverence. Making the scriptures the center is idolatry, because that is the place reserved for Christ. It is a substitution where the book replaces the Person, the text replaces the encounter, the propositions replace the Presence.

The Bible itself will not let this stand. From cover to cover, it is pointing somewhere. And where it points is not to itself.

And here is the thing that undoes every argument for making the faith primarily doctrinal or textual: a child does not need any of it to find Christ. Not a Bible, not a catechism, not a theology degree, not a refined eschatology. A child hears the Master saying, “Come to Me,” and she comes. This is the gospel in its purest form. The martyrs who could not read possessed the same Christ as the greatest theologian who ever lived. The persecuted believer in North Korea who has never held a Bible abides in the same Vine as the seminary professor with a library full of commentaries. The faith has never been as complicated as we have made it.

So what would your faith look like if the book were taken away tomorrow? Not weakened, not diminished—but taken. What remains? That answer is worth knowing. Because what remains when everything else is stripped away is what you actually have. And what God has always wanted to give you is not a book about Himself. It is Himself.

That is what the Bible is for.

Subscribe now

But there is something we may have missed. Many of these beloved songs—the ones lodged deepest in the memory of the church—are not simply beautiful expressions of devotion. They are testimony. They are dispatches from an interior country that most of their singers never thought to visit, written by men and women who had been there and were trying, in rhyme and melody, to tell us what they found.

The Inner Room changes the way we read them. Once you know there is a real place of fellowship within, a place where the redeemed spirit meets the risen Christ, face to face, in the Third Heaven, you begin to hear these songs differently. What sounded like poetry begins to sound like a map.

Let’s walk through some of these songs together and see what we find.

“I Come to the Garden Alone”

In the spring of 1912, C. Austin Miles sat in his darkroom in New Jersey, windowless, waiting for photographs to develop, and opened his Bible to John 20. He began to read about Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb, and something opened. He later wrote that he felt himself transported into the scene: the garden, the morning, the risen Christ speaking a single word—Mary—and the recognition that followed. By the time he came back to himself, the hymn was essentially written. I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses, and the voice I hear falling on my ear, the Son of God discloses.

Miles was not describing a physical place. He was describing what happened when a human spirit encountered the risen Christ in the interior place of meeting. The garden is Eden recovered. The dew is the freshness of His presence. The voice falling on the ear is not an audible sound in a New Jersey darkroom. It is the voice of the Spirit speaking to the spirit within. And He walks with me, and He talks with me, and He tells me I am His own. This is face-to-face fellowship in the Inner Room: unhurried, personal, the joy of it so singular that, as Miles wrote, none other has ever known it, because it belongs to that soul alone, in that moment, with that Savior.

They sang it for generations and called it a lovely song. It was a testimony.

“Open the Eyes of My Heart”

Paul Baloche’s worship chorus is not a metaphor about wanting a better perspective on life. It is a threshold prayer. The eyes of the heart, Paul’s phrase in Ephesians 1:18, are the perceptive faculty of the human spirit, the capacity within us to see what is spiritually real. When we sing open the eyes of my heart, Lord, I want to see You, we are asking for the Inner Room to open. We are asking to be oriented inward and upward, toward the One who already dwells within us. The prayer is not wishful. It is directional. It is asking for sight, interior and spiritual and real, to be granted so that we can behold what is already present and already true.

Every time a congregation has sung that song, they have been praying the right prayer. They just did not always know what door they were standing at.

“Blessed Assurance”

Fanny Crosby wrote from a particular vantage point. Blind from infancy, she had no outer sight, and so she developed inner sight with extraordinary depth. When she wrote visions of rapture now burst on my sight, she was not writing aspirationally. She was reporting. The word now is doing heavy theological lifting in that line. Not later. Not in glory. Now, in this life, in this body, available to this spirit.

Read the arc of the hymn slowly. The first verse establishes identity: heir of salvation, purchase of God, born of His Spirit, washed in His blood. This is who you are, tripartite, redeemed, indwelt. The second verse moves inward: visions of rapture now burst on my sight, angels descending, bring from above echoes of mercy, whispers of love. This is the Inner Room opening, interior vision, heavenly awareness, the senses of the spirit engaged and alive. The third verse arrives at rest: perfect submission, all is at rest, I in my Savior am happy and blest, watching and waiting, looking above, filled with His goodness, lost in His love. Lost. Not striving. Not performing. Resting in the place where the spirit has always belonged.

That arc, identity to vision to rest, is the arc of entering the Inner Room. Crosby had been there. She wrote it down in rhyme.

Subscribe now

“Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus”

Helen Lemmel wrote this hymn in 1922 after a friend handed her a short tract with a single line that arrested her: “So then, turn your eyes upon Him, look full into His face and you will find that the things of earth will acquire a strange dimness.” Lemmel later said that as she read it, the melody and words came to her almost simultaneously, as if they had already existed and were simply waiting to be received.

Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in His wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace.

This is not a call to think more positively. It is a call to behold. The language is the language of 2 Corinthians 3:18: we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed. The beholding is interior. The face is within. The dimming of earthly things is not disengagement from the world. It is the natural consequence of having found what is most real. When the spirit enters the Inner Room and looks full into His face, the noise of the outer life simply loses its grip. Not by effort. By light.

Lemmel received a line from a tract and found herself at the threshold of a vision. That is itself an Inner Room story.

A Cloud of Witnesses

These four are not alone. The hymn tradition is full of voices saying the same thing in different registers.

Cleland McAfee wrote in 1903: There is a place of quiet rest, near to the heart of God. A place. Not a posture, not a mood, but a location. McAfee named it without perhaps fully knowing what he had named.

William Walford, in 1845, described a sweet hour of prayer that calls the soul away from the world of care, bidding it come to the Father’s presence. That calling away, that movement inward and upward, is the threshold crossing into the Inner Room every time.

Annie Hawks heard a tender voice in 1872 and wrote I need Thee every hour, no tender voice like Thine can peace afford. Miles heard a voice. Hawks heard a voice. Two hymn writers separated by forty years both testified to the same interior sound. We should take that seriously.

Fanny Crosby returned again in 1875, and she could not seem to stop writing from this place, with I am Thine, O Lord, I have heard Thy voice... let my soul look up with a steadfast hope, and my will be lost in Thine. The soul looking up from within. The will surrendered. This is the posture of Inner Room fellowship.

Crosby again, in 1890: He hideth my soul in the cleft of the rock. The imagery is Exodus 33, Moses hidden in the cleft while the glory passes. The soul hidden in Christ, not merely protected by Him. Interior refuge. The Inner Room as shelter.

And Henry Lyte, in 1847, wrote a word he may not have known carried Greek freight: Abide with me. The word is menō in the New Testament, the same root as moné, the Inner Room of John 14. In my Father’s house are many moné. Lyte did not need to know the Greek. The Spirit knew. Every time a congregation has sung abide with me, they have been singing, without knowing it, moné with me, stay, dwell, make your home within.

What the Singers Knew

These men and women were not writing metaphors. They were writing maps. They had been somewhere, or were longing with a longing too specific for mere imagination, and they set it down in the only language available to them: melody and rhyme.

The Inner Room has always been there. The saints have always known. The tradition has always carried the testimony, Sunday after Sunday, generation after generation, in songs everyone could sing and almost no one stopped to take literally.

You can take them literally now.

The garden is real. The voice is real. The visions of rapture are available now. The place of quiet rest near to the heart of God is not a metaphor. It is an address. Your spirit knows the way.

Go there.

Peace & Grace,

Pastor Scot

Subscribe now