The Chairs With Ribbon On Them

Eight in the morning and the hall is empty and cold, and the ribbon is in a shopping bag on the floor.

Marguerite has done this so many times that her hands do it while she thinks about something else. Front two rows, both sides of the aisle. A loop over the top rail, a knot, a bow, pull the tails even, move on. The white ribbon goes on the chairs at eight and the wedding is at two, and every single person who will sit in these chairs is at this moment asleep, or in a car, or standing in a kitchen somewhere arguing about a tie.

Nobody has arrived. That is the whole condition of the room. The chairs are reserved, and reserved is a completed act done to a chair in an empty hall by a woman with a bag of ribbon, hours before the first door opens.

She has been doing weddings at this hall for thirty years. She has set out, and cleared away, and washed up, and carried, and stayed late, and come early, and she has never once sat in the front two rows, and she would tell you cheerfully that she does not want to and would not know what to do with herself. That is true. It is also not the whole of what is going on in her, and she knows it, and she is fifty-eight, and she has begun to notice that she cannot hear a good word about herself without immediately hearing a bill.

The bride's aunt comes in with the flowers and stands looking at the ribboned rows and says, without any particular weight, oh, that is lovely. The ribbon is not because they are important, you know. It is because we know who they are.

Marguerite's hands go on tying. Something in her chest does not.

You are in that hall. You may not have a bag of ribbon, but you know the arithmetic she runs, and you know exactly how it feels to be useful in a room you are not sure you are in.

Before the foundation of the world

Paul opens his letter to the Ephesians with one enormous sentence, and this is the part of it I want in your hands this morning.

According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love.Ephesians 1:4

Take the timestamp first, because everything else in the verse hangs off it. Before the foundation of the world. Before the ground was laid. Before there was a floor for a chair to stand on, before there was a hall, before there was a you to inspect.

That phrase is not decorative. It is doing a specific job, and the job is to remove every candidate for a reason in you. You cannot have been chosen for your record, because there was no record. Not for your usefulness, because nothing was made yet for you to be useful in. Not for your promise, not for the way you turned out, not for the thirty years of setting up chairs. The choosing is older than the material.

You were chosen before there was a world to be chosen in, and that puts the whole question behind you rather than in front of you. That is written into the first paragraph of Paul's letter and it is not my flattery, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line about eternity and lays it across a woman's hands in a cold hall at eight in the morning.

Now the second half, because the second half is where the word we came for turns up. That we should be holy and without blame before him. Holy is what He chose us for. It is the purpose clause. It sits after the choosing, downstream of it, describing what the choosing is for, and it is not a condition attached to the front of it.

Read the order once more slowly. He chose. Before anything. So that we should be holy. Holiness is the destination of the choosing, not the ticket you produce at the door.

And then three words nobody quotes

The verse does not end at without blame. It ends in love. Those two words are hanging off the end of the sentence and half the sermons on this verse leave them in the bag.

Before him in love. That is the room the whole thing happens in. Not before Him under inspection. Not before Him on approval. Before Him in love, which is the atmosphere the choosing was made in and the atmosphere the holiness is worked out in, and if you have been standing before Him in audit for thirty years then somebody has moved you into the wrong room.

You are standing in the room He put you in, and it is already yours, and there is nothing in it holding a clipboard. Ephesians 1 says in love with its own last breath, and the same Spirit who moved Paul to write it is the one making that a present fact in your body rather than a doctrine you agree with.

I want to be careful here. I am not saying that how you live is unimportant, and I am certainly not saying you are excused from anything. Paul spends three more chapters on how a chosen people live and he does not soften a line of it. What I am saying is that the seat was reserved in an empty hall. The living happens in the chair. It does not buy the chair, and it never could, because the ribbon went on before the world had a floor.

And the people who taught you to run the arithmetic mostly ran it themselves and it cost them their whole lives. This is not a case against anybody. It is a bag of ribbon, and a timestamp, and the three words at the end of the verse.