You Don't Get to Live at the Altar

In 2018, my wife wanted to move.

You need to understand what that sentence does to me. I hate moving. The word by itself raises my blood pressure. My wife, on the other hand, would move every year if I let her. She loves making a home. She loves design, she loves decorating, and she is so good at it that people keep buying our houses out from under us for more than we paid. She has never once been wrong about a house.

I still hate moving.

So when she started asking me to go look at properties, I gave her the most spiritual answer a husband has ever given his wife.

"I'm gonna need to pray about it."

Let's be honest about what that was. Sometimes a man says I need to pray about it because he intends to seek God. And sometimes he says it because he has found a way to say no that sounds holy. You know which one I was doing. So did she.

But I did pray. And I wasn't two minutes in when I heard the Lord say:

Open the Bible anywhere and point.

Now that's a nerve-racking way to hear from God. It's biblical Russian roulette. You don't know what you're going to get, and you're hoping it's not a passage about fasting for forty days or selling everything you own.

I opened it. I dropped my finger onto the middle of the page.

Even the sparrow has found a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may have her young — a place near your altar, LORD Almighty, my King and my God. — Psalm 84:3

I read it, and I knew immediately what God was saying about the house. Your wife needs a nest. Go find her one. Fine. Message received. I'd been outvoted by the Almighty and I knew it.

But that isn't the part that stayed with me.

A place near your altar.

That was the first time in my life I ever thought about that word. The altar. It stuck in me like a splinter, and it would not work its way out.

Then came the years of looking.

Not weeks. Years. And the whole time I had a picture in my head of how this was going to go: we'd find a piece of land, we'd build our home on it, and that same land would become a gathering place. Home and altar, one property. It was a good plan.

God let me carry that plan around for a long time. I'll come back to that.

Then in 2020 I was driving down the road, and I heard Him say eight words:

If you buy me that, I'll meet you there.

That was the altar.

Here's the part I'd rather not tell you.

We could not have afforded that property as a ministry purchase. Not then. Not close. If God had told me plainly in 2020 — buy this land, you will never live on it, it is not for you — I would not have done it. I couldn't have justified the money, and I wouldn't have had the faith.

But I thought we were going to live there. And that thought is what let me sign.

I believe God knew that. I don't think He lied to me. He never once said we'd live there — I assumed it, and He let me keep assuming it long enough to obey.

Sit with that for a minute, because there's something in it for you. God will very often give you exactly as much of the plan as you're able to say yes to. Not more. If He showed you the whole thing today, you'd faint. So He gives you the next step, and He is patient with the parts you've filled in yourself, and He lets your half-right understanding carry you all the way to obedience.

You don't need the whole plan. You need the next yes.

We bought it. And He kept His word.

He met us there. He has met us there over and over — gatherings where the Holy Spirit came, and thousands of people encountered Him. People healed. People saved. People baptized. Things I could not have engineered on my best day with my best team and all the money in the world.

And all the while, we kept driving out there with the survey in hand, looking for the right spot to put our house.

The Lord kept saying no.

It took me longer than it should have to understand what He was telling me. We were never going to live there. Because what He'd actually said that morning in 2018 was never a place at your altar.

It was a place near your altar.

We live about five minutes away. And I drive out here every single day. I'm sitting in my cabin on that property writing this to you right now, and He meets me here, just as He said He would.

So here's what I want to leave you with, and I want you to actually do something with it.

Nobody lives on the altar. Not you, not me, not one person in Scripture. And here's the reason, and it took me too long to see it.

An altar was never a place you go to live. It's a place you go to die.

T

hat's what the thing was built for. Something climbed up on it and did not come back down. Every altar in the Old Testament had blood on it — that was the entire purpose of the furniture. Nothing has changed since except what's lying on it. It's you now.

You come to the altar to die to yourself. To die to the flesh. To die to the plan you made for your life that you keep quietly resurrecting when nobody's watching.

And when we baptize people out here — and we have baptized a lot of them — we are burying them. That's what that water is. We put a man under dead and pull him up alive.

So of course you don't get to live there. Nobody lives where they die.

You come. The sparrow doesn't nest on the altar. She nests near it. Close enough to hear everything. Far enough that she has to fly.

Most Christians I meet don't have an altar. They have a general willingness. They'd surrender if God brought it up. They're open to it. But there's no place they go, no time they go there, nothing on the calendar — and so nothing ever actually dies. A man cannot die to himself in theory.

So build one. I don't mean stones. I mean a place and a time that you go to on purpose.

It can be a chair in your basement at 5:30 in the morning. The truck, before you turn the key. The end of a gravel road. A corner of the shop before anybody else shows up. It does not have to be impressive, and it does not have to be yours — but it has to be somewhere, and you have to go.

Then go tomorrow. And the day after that.

Because when God says If you buy me that, I'll meet you there — He means it. But you still have to drive out.

And you still have to climb up.