The Hill Was Full and He Could Not See It

The stairwell has a window at every landing and nobody in this building uses the stairs, which is why he does. Nine flights, twice a day, and at half past four the light comes through the fourth floor window in a way that makes the whole shaft look like something.

He notices that. He has noticed it for years. It has never once occurred to him to think anything about it.

Because here is his settled view of this place, arrived at somewhere in the third year and never revisited: it is a dead building. Twelve hundred people, nine floors, and as far as he can tell not one thing of God happening in any of it. The kitchen conversations are about the parking. The all staff email is about the parking. Somebody had a leaving do on Thursday and there was a card and everybody signed it and wrote all the best.

He prays on the way in. He prays for the day, for his team, for the difficult one on the fifth floor. And then he goes in and works hard and goes home, and the praying and the building have nothing to do with each other, and he has stopped expecting them to.

Brother, sit on the step with me a minute. Because there is a hill in Second Kings with a young man standing on it in a complete panic, and the thing he was panicking about was already surrounded.

Two men on the same hill, one of them terrified

The king of Syria has sent an army by night to take one prophet. Elisha's servant gets up in the morning, goes outside, and sees the city ringed with horses and chariots.

He does what anybody would do. He goes back in and says, in effect, we are finished.

And Elisha says something that must have sounded insane, that there are more with us than with them, and then he prays.

And Elisha prayed, and said, LORD, I pray thee, open his eyes, that he may see. And the LORD opened the eyes of the young man; and he saw: and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha.2 Kings 6:17

Read the prayer, because it is the whole point. He does not ask for horses. He does not ask for reinforcements or a rescue or an angel. He asks for the young man's eyes.

Nothing was added to that hill. Nothing arrived. The mountain was already full when the servant was standing on it in a panic, and the only thing that changed in the entire account was what one man could see.

You are standing somewhere fuller than you have been able to see, and the prayer in that account asked for eyes rather than for reinforcements. That is not a hopeful gloss on a war story; 2 Kings 6:17 has the mountain already full before it is seen, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a hillside at Dothan and stands it up in a stairwell at half past four. Nothing has to be sent to this building. Something has to be shown to you.

Now let me say the second half, and it is about how you arrived at the verdict.

You did not decide this place was empty. You concluded it, slowly, over years, from an absence of evidence. And the absence was real: nobody has been converted at the coffee machine, nobody has wept in a meeting, the all staff email is genuinely about the parking.

But an absence of visible evidence is exactly the condition the servant was in, and he was factually wrong. Not slightly wrong. Wrong about the entire military situation, while looking directly at it.

You have been reasoning correctly from evidence you could not see all of, and being wrong that way is not a failure of faith. 2 Corinthians 4:18 says we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a practical instruction about a workplace rather than a philosophical remark. Your eyes were not lying to you. They were just not the whole report.

What He is usually doing in a place like that

Let me be careful here, because I am not going to manufacture a sign for you.

I am not going to tell you there is a revival breaking out on your fourth floor, or that the difficult one on the fifth is secretly seeking God. I do not know and neither do you and inventing it would insult us both.

What I will tell you is what Scripture says God is characteristically doing, everywhere, at all times. He is upholding all things by the word of His power (Hebrews 1:3). He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good (Matthew 5:45). He gives to all life and breath and all things (Acts 17:25). Twelve hundred people are breathing in that building today on a supply nobody there has thought about once.

That is not a small thing dressed up. That is the actual, unglamorous, continuous work of God, going on in your stairwell all day.

You are inside a place He is actively holding together, and He has never once left a room to run itself. Hebrews 1:3 says He upholds all things by the word of His power, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes upholding a felt fact on a fourth floor landing rather than a doctrine about providence. The building is not dead. Nothing is.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it does more than pray on the commute.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed a man plants. Not the amount of spiritual activity you can currently detect around you. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.