If The Sky Opened Tonight

Somebody asked him at the end of an evening, half joking, and it turned out not to be a joke at all.

Right, he said. Say God opened heaven over your house tonight. What lands?

And the man could not answer. He sat there with his cup going cold and found that he genuinely did not know. He had spent eleven years in rooms where people described what an open heaven produces, and every description he had ever been handed was somebody else's, and now, asked directly, he had nothing of his own to say.

He could have told you what he was supposed to want. That came straight away. It was the wanting itself that had gone.

That is a specific kind of tired and it does not get talked about much. Not doubt. Not anger. Just the slow disappearance of the ability to say what you actually want from God, because for years the answer has been supplied to you before you could get to it.

If you would have sat there with the cold cup too, come in and sit down. There is room at this table and nobody is going to ask you to perform an expectation.

Look at what heaven has actually sent

Let us not argue about the descriptions handed round. Let us go and look at the deliveries instead, and let the Holy Spirit make of them what He will.

Every time Scripture opens the sky, something comes down, and it is worth naming them one after another, because a list you can see beats a promise you were handed.

Rain came down on ground that had been dry for years, and a man who had prayed for it sat with his face between his knees while a servant went to look seven times. Bread came down in a wilderness on people who had no way of feeding themselves, six mornings out of seven, for a very long time. A word came down to a man asleep on a stone in the worst week of his life. Fire came down on a soaked altar in front of a nation that had stopped knowing whose they were. The Spirit came down on a room of ordinary people who were only sitting there. And the Son came down, which is the one the others were all pointing at.

Look at the pattern in that list.

You are not waiting on a delivery. You are being given the One who sends it. The written word says every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights (James 1:17), and the gift and the Father are named in the same breath on purpose, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a warm fact rather than a tidy sentence.

What was actually being described to you

Here is the honest thing about eleven years of descriptions.

Most of them were somebody's real experience, reported in the biggest words they had. That is not wickedness. It is what people do when something good has happened to them. The trouble is that a description repeated often enough becomes a specification, and a specification tells you what to expect, and being told what to expect is exactly the thing that took your own wanting off you.

So I am not going to hand you another specification. I have not got one, and if I made one up it would sit on top of yours the same way theirs did.

You are allowed to want what you actually want, and to say it in your own words. Delight thyself also in the Lord, and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart is in the book (Psalm 37:4), and it is a verse about a man with desires and not a man with a list, and the Spirit is the one who makes the wanting come back where it has gone quiet.

The one thing an open heaven has never been

I want to say this plainly once, because this domain carries a name that has been used badly, and you may be braced for it.

An open heaven is not a payout. Not here, not ever. Nothing on this site connects God's openness toward you to money in any direction, and there is nothing here to give, join, or take part in. If somebody has taught you otherwise, I am not going to argue with them by name, and I am not going to make you feel foolish for having listened, because most people who listened were listening in good faith and in genuine need.

What I will do is point at the deliveries again. Rain, bread, a word, fire, the Spirit, the Son. God has never once opened the sky and sent a sum.

You have His presence and His word and His own hand toward you, and that is what has always come down. He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things (Romans 8:32), and with him is the phrase to notice, because everything else arrives attached to the Person, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that land as gift rather than as consolation.