The Third Floor at Three

The badge reader on the third floor makes a small green sound, and he is the only one in the building who hears it.

Marcus works eleven to seven, and three is the fourth stop on a round that takes fifty minutes done properly. Lobby, stairwell, two, three, four, the copy room where the machine sleeps with one blue light on. He carries a flashlight he almost never switches on, because he knows this building in the dark better than the people who work here know it in the day.

The floor lights come on ahead of him and go off behind him, so he moves through the building inside a small traveling room of light. Cubicles. A cardigan over a chair. Somebody's kid in a soccer uniform in a frame. The window at the end of three looks down on the parking lot. Six cars, one of them his.

He was in that church before he could walk. Car seat, second row, baptized at nine in a white robe too big for him. His father has been a deacon for thirty four years and prays out loud at the dinner table the way other men clear their throats. And at this hour, four nights a week, the same thing stands up in his chest.

What is it, actually. Born again. What is the thing that is supposed to have happened to a person. Did it happen to me. And if I say that out loud, what does it do to my father's face.

He cannot ask his father; he can hear the answer already, and he can see what the question would do to a man who has spent thirty four years counting on it. He cannot ask the pastor, who once said, we lean on the steady ones. So it gets said here. Or almost said. On three, at three, into a floor with nobody on it. Then he goes down to four.

You know the floor. Yours might be a truck in a driveway with the engine off, or the shower, or twenty minutes of a drive nobody else is in. And you know the question, and the exact reason it has never been let out in daylight: not because you doubt the kindness of God, but because of what it would do to the people who are certain you already have the answer.

The man who came at the hour nobody watches

Let me tell you what a house knows about a door.

Where my family comes from, a small lamp is kept burning by the door at night, and it is not for the family. The family is asleep. It is for whoever is still on the road. A traveler who knocks at midnight is not an inconvenience to that house; he is its honor. Bread comes out, and olives, and somebody sits down with him and does not hurry him.

That is how John opens his third chapter. A man of the Pharisees, named, a ruler of the Jews: a teacher other people brought their questions to, with a great deal to lose.

Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. This man came to Jesus by night.John 3:1-2

He is not the coward of the chapter. He crossed a dark city on foot and knocked, and he opened by giving honor, calling Him a teacher come from God. The door opened at that hour, and not one person was told.

You are expected at three in the morning on an empty floor, and you were expected long before you knew where the door was. Scripture put the hour into the record on purpose, John 3:2, so that a night visit would never have to be defended by the man making it, and it is the Holy Spirit who lifts a line two thousand years old off the page and sets it in an office building at three.

Notice what He did not do with him. He did not send him back for daylight and He did not mention it to a soul. He answered him, and the sentence the world knows by heart, that God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, was said at night to one religious man who could not ask in the day.

You have somewhere to put the thing you cannot say in daylight, and it is not a place that talks. It is written that He knew what was in man and needed nobody to tell Him, so nothing carried up a stairwell arrives as news, and His Spirit is the one who turns a page into a room with two people in it.

The teacher who did not know

Here is the line I want in your hands tonight, and it is the one most often read as an insult.

Jesus answered him, Are you the teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?John 3:10

Read it in the room instead of from a platform. It is asked in private, to a man's face, by the only person entitled to ask it, and never mentioned again. Later, Nicodemus is on his feet in that same council insisting a man be given a hearing before he is judged, John 7:50-51, and later still he is at a tomb in daylight, carrying spices with his own arms, John 19:39. His standing was not taken off him for asking. It grew.

The weight was never the question. It is what a man believes the question proves about him: that somebody raised in this since the car seat, who still cannot say what the new birth is, must have been outside the whole time and performing the inside.

You have a teacher who answers the question He could have used to embarrass you, and you have Him at the one hour that is actually free. It is written that He put that sharp thing to a ruler's face and then kept teaching him, John 3:10 and on into the greatest sentence in the book, and the Spirit takes what is written and makes it living in a stairwell.

He was not saying a man of that position ought to know better. He was saying that a man of that position had read about it his whole life and never once thought it would be done to him rather than achieved by him.

You have been reading about this longer than you know, and it was set down in words older than the building you grew up in. Ezekiel 36:26 promised a new heart given and a new spirit put within, given and put, the work of somebody else's hands, and the same Spirit named in that promise is the one at work in whoever reads it.

Nobody follows the wind back to where it started

He answered the how with weather.

The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.John 3:8

I have stood on a flat roof at the edge of a desert town and watched wind come across at night, and here is the thing about wind: nobody sees it. What a man sees is the lamp lean, dust turning in the doorway, the cloth on the line going straight out. Nobody ever hunted down its starting point, and nobody ever concluded from that failure that there was no wind.

That is what He gave a man who wanted a mechanism, and it is the answer to the audit that gets run on three every night: a man walking his own life the way he walks a building, looking for an open window. A date. A feeling. A before and an after.

You are permitted to know a thing by its evidence rather than by its mechanism, and you have that permission from the mouth of Jesus Himself. John 3:8 says the wind blows where it wishes and so it is with everyone born of the Spirit, and it is the Spirit who does the blowing, never the ability of the man underneath it to diagram Him.

So stop hunting the moment and look at the cloth. A man who talks to God on a stairwell out of plain habit, at an hour when nobody would know if he quit.

You have a thirst that has not dried up in all these years, and Scripture treats a thirst like that as a mark of life and never as a fault. Psalm 42 puts it in a worshiper's own mouth, that as the deer pants for the water brooks so his soul pants for God, and the Spirit is the one keeping that thirst wet in a man walking an empty building at three.