First to the Altar, Every Sunday

She is out of her seat before the invitation is finished. She always is.

Everybody in that building knows it. It is not a secret and it is not even a subject; it is simply a fact about Sunday, like the second offering or the way the organ comes in. When the pastor says come, Sister Delphine is already coming, and by the time anybody else is up she is on her knees at the front with her hands open, and she stays there through the whole song and sometimes past it.

The young ones think it is devotion. Some of them have said, out loud, that they wish they had what she has.

Delphine has been doing this for twenty-two years, and here is what nobody knows, because nobody has ever sat down beside her and asked.

She is not going up for a fresh touch. She is not interceding for the church. She is going up because she does not believe last Sunday held, and because the only week of her whole Christian life that she has ever felt certain was the week she first went up, and she has been trying to get back to that week ever since, one Sunday at a time, for two decades.

She would not say it that way. If you asked her she would say, I just love the altar. And that is true too. But underneath it there is a woman on her knees on a worn patch of carpet doing the only thing she has ever known to do about a fear she has never once put into words.

And you have your own altar. Maybe it is a rail, maybe it is a spot on your bedroom floor at eleven at night. But you go, and you go often, and if somebody asked you gently why, you would find that the true answer is not the one you would give.

Sit with me for a minute. There is one verse with two halves, and you have been living in the first half only, and the second half is where the whole life is.

Read both halves of the verse

For in that he died, he died unto sin once: but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God.Romans 6:10

Two halves. Watch them both.

He died unto sin once. Once. Paul is writing to people who had a whole religious world built on repetition, and he uses that little word like a hammer: once. The dealing with sin was a single event with a single date, and it is not on a weekly schedule.

But in that he liveth, he liveth unto God. This is the half Delphine has never been handed. There is a life on the other side of the once, and that life is not spent going back to the dying. It is spent living toward God.

You are on the other side of a once, and it is already behind you, and there is a whole life on this side that nobody has shown you how to live. I am not making a fine point in a quiet church. It is written in Romans 6:10, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence with two halves and gives a woman the half she has been missing for twenty-two years.

Nobody is taking your altar away

Now hear me, because I know what a woman in her sixties thinks when a preacher starts talking about her going forward, and she is already braced.

Nobody is going to tell you to stop going to that altar. If you want to be at the front on your knees this Sunday, go. That carpet has soaked up a lot of honest prayer and heaven has not been bored by any of it.

What we are doing is different. We are taking the weight off it. Right now that altar is carrying a job it cannot do, which is to make you sure. It was never able to and it never will be, and that is not a failure of the altar. It is that certainty was never manufactured at the front of a room; it was finished on a hill and announced in a book.

You have a certainty that was settled outside this building, and it is already settled, and no amount of carpet can add to it or wear it away. Scripture says that by one offering He has perfected forever those who are sanctified (Hebrews 10:14), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a finished work steady under a woman who has been trying to secure it weekly.

Living unto God is the part she has been robbed of

And this is the part that makes me want to sit down beside her and take her hand.

Twenty-two years of Sundays. Every one of them spent on the dying side of the verse. Which means twenty-two years of a life that could have been spent living unto God, spent instead on making sure about the dying.

Think what that woman would have been if somebody had told her in the third year. Think what she still will be.

You are alive to God right now, and it is already true of you, and the aliveness is not waiting on another Sunday to be switched on. It is written that you are to reckon yourselves alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord (Romans 6:11), and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a woman from the front of a room into the whole rest of her life.