Nine Times to the Front

Renae knows the carpet.

That is a strange thing to know about a building, but she does. She knows that the second row from the front has a seam in it, and she knows that if she kneels on the left side she gets the seam under her knee and it aches by the second verse, so she goes right. She has learned this the way you learn a route to work.

Nine times. Same church, same aisle, same thing.

Not nine different things. That would be a testimony. Nine times for one thing, the same thing, the one from before she was married, and every single time she has gone forward with her whole heart and every single time somebody has prayed with her and meant it and every single time she has walked back to her seat and sat down and waited to feel different.

And by Wednesday it is back.

So she stopped telling anybody. That is the part that hurts to write. By about the fifth time she started going up during the last verse when the lights are low and the people at the front are busy, because she had begun to be embarrassed, and a woman who is embarrassed about needing God is a woman in real trouble.

Mother Ellis catches her in the fellowship hall afterward. Not in the sanctuary, in the fellowship hall, with the foil pans out and somebody's aunt cutting a cake.

She does not ask what it was about. She says, "Baby, I have watched you go up nine times."

Renae says something about wanting to be sure.

And Mother Ellis, who is eighty-one and has buried a husband and two brothers and has never in her life rushed a sentence, says: "Sure of what, though. Because He was sure the first time. Are you going up there to receive it, or are you going up there to be seen trying?"

And Renae stands there with a paper plate in her hand and cannot answer.

Now maybe you have never walked an aisle in your life. Maybe your version is a prayer of rededication you have prayed in a car, or a fresh start you have declared on the first of a month eleven times, or a moment at a conference three years running where you went to the back of the room because the front felt like too much.

The building changes. The mechanism does not. You keep going back for a thing that is not running out, and you have begun to suspect that the going back is the problem, and that suspicion has nowhere to go, so it just sits in you on a Wednesday.

Let me put something in your hands. Not a better altar. A sentence about the last one.

One offering, and it is not running out

The writer of Hebrews has been building a case about priests who had to keep standing up, day after day, offering the same things over and over, and then he lands it.

For by one offering He has perfected for all time those who are sanctified.Hebrews 10:14

Hold that verse up to the light, because there are four things in it and every one of them is aimed at a woman with a paper plate in a fellowship hall.

One offering. Not a series of them. One.

He has perfected. Past tense, completed, done and reported.

For all time. Which includes Wednesday. Which includes the Wednesday after that.

Those who are sanctified. Present, ongoing, still in process. So Scripture is holding two things at once that your conscience has been trying to make you choose between: you are already perfected in His sight, and you are still being worked on in your living. Both. At the same time. The second one is not evidence against the first.

So hear it, because you have been carrying the opposite: you are perfected for all time by one offering, and the ache you felt on Wednesday was never a receipt reading zero. It was a heart that is alive. Dead things do not ache. I am not decorating that for you; it is written in black and white, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line and lays it on a person until their shoulders come down.

Now let me say the hard, freeing thing, and I am saying it as one who loves the altar and has wept at plenty of them.

Going forward is beautiful and it is not a machine.

An altar is a place to meet God, and God meets people there, and I would not take one of those nights away from you. But the moment it becomes a device for producing certainty, it stops being a meeting and starts being a treadmill with a carpet seam in it. And a treadmill will always ask you for one more, because a treadmill has no destination in it.

You are not failing to receive. You have received. What you are failing to do is feel, and those are two entirely different countries with two entirely different weathers.

Somebody handed you the idea that the proof of forgiveness is a lift in the chest. It is not, and it never was, and there are saints in glory who went whole decades without one. The proof of forgiveness is a cross and an empty tomb and a written promise, and the Holy Spirit gives assurance the way a friend gives it, warmly and freely and on His own timing, not the way a machine dispenses a receipt when you put the coin in.

There was a man five hundred years ago who could not stop going back. Not to an aisle, to a confessional, hour after hour, until the man hearing him grew weary of it. Everything turned for him when he understood that the righteousness he was straining to produce was a righteousness God gives away. He did not become less devoted. He became free, and the whole of Europe heard about it.

That is your line too. You have never been short of devotion. Nine trips down an aisle is not a lukewarm woman. What you have been short of is somebody standing in front of you saying: it took, the first time.