The Ninth Time He Prayed It

The clock on the dresser says 1:47 and the numbers are the only light in the room.

Wes is sitting on the edge of the bed with his feet on the floor and his elbows on his knees. His wife is asleep behind him. The furnace comes on. Down the hall the dog resettles.

He prayed it again about four minutes ago. Whispered, so as not to wake her. The same words he has said every time, more or less, the ones he learned from a card at a camp when he was nineteen. Lord, I am a sinner. I believe You died for me. Come into my life.

That was the ninth.

He knows it was the ninth because he has a list. Back page of a spiral notebook in the drawer under the phone charger, and the list has nine lines on it and each line has a date. Camp, at nineteen. A revival week at the church his mother went to. A rest stop off the interstate with a radio preacher and the engine running. A men's conference where they turned the lights down. Twice in his truck, eight months apart. A hospital chapel while his father in law was in surgery. Last spring. And tonight.

Eleven years of lines.

He is not a fool and he is not lazy. He can teach the plan of salvation off the top of his head. He has led his kids in a prayer at bedtime hundreds of times, using words he cannot get to stay in himself.

Every one of those nine times he thought: this one. This is the one that takes.

And every time, somewhere between four days and four months later, the thing comes back and sits on his chest at one in the morning, and the thing says: nothing happened. You know nothing happened. Do it again, properly this time, and mean it more.

So there are nine lines. And on the drive to work in the morning he will think about how a man cannot go to his pastor at thirty eight years old and say, I have prayed to be saved nine times, because of what that would sound like out loud.

You know the edge of the bed. Yours might be a note in a Bible flyleaf with a date written and crossed out and rewritten. Or the same words said in a parking lot after the same kind of service. And you know the arithmetic that arrives at one in the morning: if it were real, it would only have taken once.

The priests never sat down

Let me tell you about a room with no chairs in it.

In the tabernacle and later in the temple, the priest worked standing, and the writer of Hebrews builds an entire argument on it. There was nowhere to sit in that room, because the work was never finished. Morning sacrifice, evening sacrifice, the next day, the next year, generation after generation, the same blood and the same standing.

And every priest standeth daily ministering and offering oftentimes the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins: but this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God.Hebrews 10:11-12

Read the two verbs against each other. Standeth. Sat down.

A workman in my family's trade sits when the wall is up. Not before. If you walk past a job and the man is sitting with his tea, the wall is finished, and you do not need to ask him, because a man who sits has told you something with his body that words would only weaken.

You are looking at a Priest who sat down, and you were never asked to keep a service going that He closed. Hebrews 10:12 says He offered one sacrifice for sins forever and then sat, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a posture recorded two thousand years ago and makes it mean something to a man at one in the morning with his elbows on his knees.

Now hold that against the notebook. Nine lines. Nine times standing back up. The pattern in that drawer is the pattern of the old priesthood, and the whole letter to the Hebrews was written to men doing exactly that, out of sincerity, and it says to them, gently and at length, that the standing is over.

You have a finished work behind you rather than a project in front of you, and it is written that one sacrifice for sins settled it forever. Hebrews 10:12 is where those words are, and the Spirit who inspired the letter is the one who carries them into a dark bedroom, because a sentence about furniture in heaven does no good to anybody until He does.

One offering, and the word is forever

Here is the verse itself, and I want you to hear how few words it needs.

For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified.Hebrews 10:14

One. Perfected. For ever.

Not improved. Not started. Not given a good foundation that would need topping up in about four months when the feeling wore off. Perfected, which in that letter means brought to completion, and the tense of it in the original is the tense of a thing done and standing done.

You have the word forever sitting in the middle of that verse, and it was not put there loosely. Hebrews 10:14 says perfected for ever by one offering, and it is His Spirit, not the intensity a man can work up at one in the morning, who makes that sentence stand up inside a person.

Now do the arithmetic that the notebook has never done. If one offering perfected forever, what were the other eight supposed to be adding? What is prayer number six contributing to a work that Hebrews says was completed by one act, by somebody else, and sealed by Him sitting down?

You are dealing with a work that one offering completed, and you were never the second contributor to it. It is written that He has perfected for ever them that are sanctified, Hebrews 10:14, and the Spirit is the one who makes that land as relief rather than as theory, because a man cannot argue himself into rest.

What the nine prayers actually were

Now I have to say something about those nine lines, because I will not let them be shamed and I will not let them be dismissed.

Look at what is actually written in that notebook. Nine times, over eleven years, a man got alone and reached for God. In a truck. In a hospital chapel while somebody he loved was under anesthesia. At a rest stop with the engine running rather than drive on. Those are not nine failures. Every one of them is a man wanting God, and there is not a page in Scripture where that is treated as a nuisance.

At my family's table, a son who comes back to the house nine times is not a problem the house has. He is a son who keeps coming home, and the house is glad every time, and nobody is counting on the doorframe.

You have nine records of a man reaching for God, and Scripture calls that reaching by the name of prayer rather than by the name of failure. Hebrews 4:16 says come boldly to the throne of grace to find help in time of need, and the Spirit who moves a man to come is not standing behind him with a tally.

And here is where I want to be careful, because there is a bad turn available at this point and I am not taking it. None of this makes the life you live from here pointless. Hebrews 10 does not end with a man in a recliner. Four verses later it is talking about drawing near, holding fast, provoking one another to love and good works, not forsaking the gathering. The offering being finished is exactly what makes all of that something other than payment.

You are free to obey out of gratitude rather than out of arithmetic, and you were freed for that by a work you did not do. It is written that we love Him because He first loved us, 1 John 4:19, and the Spirit is the one who turns duty into that, which is a difference a man feels in his chest before he can explain it.