The Same Aisle for Thirty Years

There is a strip of carpet in that room that is a different color from the rest of it, and he could find it in the dark.

Fourth row from the back, left hand side, and then twenty two steps down to the front. He knows it is twenty two. He counted once, years ago, and has never been able to stop counting since. The hymn books smell the way they have always smelled. His wife's hand goes flat on his back at the second verse, the same way, every time, and she has never once said a word about it.

He first went down when he was twenty two, at a camp meeting under a metal roof with the rain coming on. He went at the church on Fifth Street when they moved. He went the year his daughter was in the hospital and he went the year nothing at all was wrong, which was worse. He went after his father's funeral. He went last Sunday.

He is fifty two. That is thirty years of the same twenty two steps to settle the same thing.

And he is not a hypocrite, which is the accusation he has quietly leveled at himself since about the eighth time. He means it. He means it every single time, kneeling at the step with his elbows on the wood, saying the same words in the same order, and by Wednesday it has drained out of him the way water leaves a bucket with a pinhole in it, and he cannot tell you where it went. By the following Sunday the arithmetic has already started somewhere around the third verse.

He has never told anybody. Not the pastor, who shakes his hand at the front every time with real warmth and has never once asked. Not his wife, whose hand is on his back at the second verse. Certainly not the men he sits with on Thursday.

What he thinks, in the fourth row, with the second verse going, is this: if it had ever taken, I would not be doing this again.

You know the carpet. Yours might be the fast you start every January, or the prayer you say again in the car when the year turns, or the promise you have renewed so many times you have stopped counting on purpose. And you know the pinhole, and the Wednesday, and the arithmetic that starts up around the third verse.

The line comes from the pole

I look after buildings, so start where I start: a house cannot connect itself to the power.

It does not matter how good the wiring is inside. Every outlet can be perfect, the panel can be new, the whole place can be ready, and none of it makes one lamp come on. Somebody has to come down the line from outside and make the connection at the pole. The house has never once been the party that energizes the house.

Now hear what Jesus said, in the middle of an argument, to a crowd that was doing arithmetic at Him.

No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day.John 6:44

Read the order of it. The drawing comes first, and the coming comes second, and the sentence will not run the other way around.

You are standing in front of a sentence that puts the drawing before the coming, and it was written in that order before anybody's feet ever moved. John 6:44 makes the drawing the first cause and the coming the effect, and it is the Spirit, not the sound of my saying it, who takes an order written in Greek and stands a man inside it in a fourth row.

So here is the thing I want to put in your hands and I want you to hold it. Thirty years of going down to the front is not thirty failures to get connected. Read the verse again. Nobody moves toward Him at all unless something outside the house came down the line first. The hunger that got that man out of the pew at twenty two, and at thirty, and at forty one, and last Sunday, is not the evidence of a man who cannot get there. It is the drawing, doing what a drawing does.

You have a verse where the Father draws and the Son raises up at the last day, and neither one of those clauses was left for you to supply. Scripture puts both ends of it in one sentence, and it is His Spirit holding that sentence together rather than anybody's grip on the wood at the front of a room.

Nobody is born twice by trying harder

Now put the word birth back in the middle of this, because the whole question underneath thirty years of steps is whether the thing ever happened.

Jesus called it being born. That was His word for it, chosen at night with a member of the council sitting across from him, and He did not choose it to be poetic. He chose it because of what a birth is: a thing that happens to a person, at somebody else's hands, and that nobody has ever done for themselves. Nobody in the history of the world has been born by effort. Nobody has been born twice by concentrating.

You were never the author of a birth, and nobody in Scripture has ever been the author of their own. John's first chapter says born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God, and the Spirit who ruled out three sources in a row left exactly one standing.

And I am not going to say a word against those twenty two steps. Hear me on this. Every one of those trips down was a man reaching for God in the only vocabulary his room gave him, and God is not annoyed by any of them. A father is not irritated by a child who keeps coming back to check that he is still his.

But I will tell you what the pinhole in the bucket is. It is that a man has been trying to author the thing rather than receive it, and authoring is exhausting, and nothing a man authors on Sunday survives to Wednesday, because it was never load bearing to begin with.

You have a word that calls it a birth deliberately, and it was called that because of what a birth is and who does it. John 3 puts the whole thing in the passive voice, and it is the Spirit who blows where He wishes rather than any effort mounted from inside the house.

Then what is all the obedience for

I can hear the next question, because it is the right one, and if I leave it unanswered I have done you damage.

If the birth is His doing and my walking down there never made it true, then what is the point of any of it? Why get up at all? Why the Thursday men, the giving, the not saying the thing you wanted to say to your brother?

Paul answers it in one sentence and he answers it in the right order.

Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.Philippians 2:12-13

Work out. Not work up. Not work for. A man works out what is already in there, the way a builder finishes a house that has already been connected, and every light he wires is real work that matters, and not one of them is what brings the power to the property.

You are given real work to do, and it is real, and it is not the work that makes the thing true. Philippians 2:12 says work out and the very next line says God is the one working in you, and the Spirit puts the two in that order so nobody has to guess which is carrying which.

That is why the obedience does not become pointless. It becomes possible. A man who has stopped trying to generate his own power has, for the first time, all his strength available for the actual house: his wife, his brother, the four people who need him, the Thursday men.

You have a God who works in you both to will and to do, and that is the order Scripture puts it in and it does not reverse. Philippians 2:13 says He is the one working, and it is His Spirit doing that working, quietly, on a Wednesday, when nothing at all is being felt.