The Guest Who Came With Empty Hands

Saturday morning, and Idris is standing at the end of his own street with both hands empty and no idea in the world what to do with them.

He is thirty-five minutes late. Down at the far end the gate is standing open the way it always stands open on a Saturday, and he can hear them from here, the particular noise a courtyard makes when there are nine or ten people around a table and somebody has said something that landed. Somebody is laughing the big laugh. He knows exactly who that is.

In thirty-one years Idris has never once walked through anybody's gate carrying nothing.

He could give you the whole list if you had an afternoon. A tray of bread still warm through the cloth. The good olives from the man on the corner, which cost him twenty minutes of walking he never mentioned to anybody. A jar of the preserve his mother used to make, which he learned to make himself the winter after she died and has never gotten quite right. A bicycle wheel trued. A lamp rewired. The chair with the split rail, sanded and glued and clamped overnight and carried back down the street on his shoulder.

And this morning there is nothing.

Not because the cupboard is empty. The cupboard is exactly as it always is. He got up at five, the way he does, and he sat on the edge of the bed for fifty minutes with his hands on his knees, and at ten to six he went and stood in front of the bread and could not make the bread happen. He stood there long enough for the light to change on the wall. And then he put his shoes on and walked to the end of the street and stopped.

Something has gone out of him this month and he does not have a word for it. He is not sick, as far as he knows. Nothing has happened that he could write down in a sentence and hand to anybody. It is simply that the part of him that produces things has gone quiet, all at once, the way a well does, and he has been running on it for so long that he never once asked how deep it went.

He could turn around. That is the honest truth of the corner he is standing on. Nobody down there would think about it twice. Idris being absent would be explained by eleven people in eleven kind ways before the tea went round the second time.

And the thing keeping him on this corner is not tiredness at all.

It is that at forty-nine years old he has absolutely no idea how a man walks into a room he cannot bring anything into.

You know that corner. You have stood on it, in a doorway or a parking lot or at the bottom of somebody's steps, with nothing in your hands for the first time in your adult life. And the strange thing, the thing you would not say to a soul, is that going in with nothing feels less like being tired and more like being caught.

Empty Handed Is The Only Way Anybody Has Ever Come

I want to give you the verse first, and then I want to show you the one word in it that most people read straight past.

"Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need."Hebrews 4:16

Confidence. Some translations say boldly. That is the word, and look at where it sits: it is what a person is told to carry as they approach, and it is the only thing they are told to carry. There is no second item on the list. Nothing about arriving in good order. Nothing about having something in hand.

You are welcome at that throne this morning with absolutely nothing in your hands. Hebrews 4:16 says to come with confidence and receive mercy in the time of need, and the time of need is not a season you have to qualify for, it is simply the day you are having. The Holy Spirit is the one who walks a man up to a door like that, which is the only reason anybody empty ever gets through it.

Notice also what the verse says we go there to do. Receive. Not present. Not report. Not offer. The traffic in that sentence runs one direction and it is toward the person arriving.

You have been the one carrying something through every gate for thirty-one years, and not one of those gates ever charged you for entry. The Spirit has never once stood at a door counting what was in a man's hands, and Titus 3:5 says it in the plainest sentence in the letter, that He saved us not because of works done by us in righteousness but according to His own mercy.

Read that again slowly if you are the man on the corner. Not because of works done by us. That is the founding transaction of your entire life with God, and it was settled with your hands exactly as empty as they are this morning.

You were received on the first day, in that condition, and nothing since has altered the terms. That is written into Romans 5:8, not softened for the occasion, and the same Spirit who put that line there is standing on the corner with you at this exact moment.

Nobody Is Billing You For This

Now let me say the thing that this whole page exists for, and I am going to say it without a single condition attached, because the condition is what has been killing you.

You are being met by God today for your own sake and for no other reason. No sentence of mine could carry that. Scripture does, in Psalm 103:13, where the Lord shows compassion to those who fear Him as a father shows compassion to his children, and a father does not do that so that the child will be more productive by Thursday. The Spirit is not conducting maintenance on an asset.

I am not going to tell you that God is filling you up so you can pour out again. That sentence is everywhere and it is a bill in a kind voice. It takes a moment of pure mercy and quietly turns it into an advance against future work, and a man who has been giving his whole life will read it in half a second and start doing the arithmetic before the mercy has even landed.

So: no. He is not restoring you for the sake of anybody who is going to need you later. He is not investing. Today the mercy is toward you, and it stops there, and that is not a smaller thing than the other version. It is the actual thing.

You have nothing today and nothing is what the whole arrangement was built for. It is written down, in Second Corinthians 12:9, that His power is made perfect in weakness, and the same Spirit who inspired that answer to a man begging for the weakness to be taken away has never treated an empty morning as a disqualification.

And hear the site's own rule in your own case, because you would extend it to anybody else without thinking about it. Mercy has a size and the size is allowed to be small. If today the size is zero, then the size is zero, and there is no verdict in this house about that, and there is nothing to catch up on tomorrow.