He Sat Down

The band has gone quiet under the last verse and the man in row eleven has his hand on the seat in front, the way he has had it four times before, ready to lever himself up.

Big hall, hired for the weekend, six hundred people and the heaters going. Coat over his arm because he was going to leave at the end and now he is not sure. He has heard this invitation before. He heard it in a school gym at nineteen and went forward and meant it, and again in a church at twenty six after the bad year, and again in a tent by the coast, and again, quietly, at the back of a Sunday service with nobody watching, and every single time he meant it and every single time, somewhere in the weeks after, it slid. Not into anything terrible. Just into not being sure. Did that one take. Was I really praying or was I only repeating. Would a person who had actually received it be standing here again with a coat over his arm.

He has never told anyone the number. His wife knows about the first one. His pastor thinks it was the church one. Nobody knows there have been four, and nobody knows that the reason his hand is on the seat in front is that he is fairly sure none of them worked, and that if he goes forward one more time and means it harder, this might be the one that sticks. His knees are already bending. The man beside him has moved his legs to let him past.

You know row eleven. Your number is your own, and you have your own gym and your own tent, and your own private theory that the last one did not count because of what you felt or did not feel afterwards. And you know the hand on the seat in front, the readiness to stand up one more time and try to make it stick.

The priest stood up every morning

Let me show you a drawing of two men, because I read Scripture the way a builder reads plans and there is a plan here with two figures on it, and one of them is you.

The first is a priest in the temple. The letter to the Hebrews describes his week: he stands, daily, offering the same sacrifices again and again, and the reason he stands every day is that nothing he offers is ever finished. Tomorrow there is another lamb because today's did not settle it. He is not doing anything wrong. His standing is simply what an unfinished work looks like from the outside. You stand up when there is more to do.

Then the second figure.

And every priest stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God.Hebrews 10:11-12

He sat down. Read what that posture means in a place where every other priest stood. Sitting down is what a man does when the job is complete and there is nothing left on the list. Jesus said it out loud on the cross with the last of His breath, it is finished (John 19:30), and then, Hebrews says, He took the seat that a working priest never takes. The one figure who could have stayed standing sat down, because there was nothing more to offer.

You have a High Priest who sat down, and He sat down over your case, and He is still seated. That is not my picture of Him; it is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who lifts that seated figure off the page and puts Him in front of a man in row eleven with his knees already bending. Nothing you do at the front of that hall adds a lamb to a table where the last lamb has already been offered.

Which figure has been standing

Now the weight, and I am going to name it plainly, because you have carried it under the wrong name for years, and neither Scripture nor the Spirit ever gave it that name.

You have been the priest. Not by choice and not by pride; you were never taught otherwise. Every time it slid, you stood up again and offered the same thing again, the same prayer, the same walk, the same meaning it as hard as you could, because somewhere in you the work felt unfinished, and an unfinished work makes a man stand. Four times. Six. Whatever the number is. And every one of those times you have measured afterwards whether it took, and read your own uncertainty as the verdict, and stood up again.

Hear me. You have never once been the priest, and the standing was never yours to do, because the offering was made once and the one who made it sat down. Hebrews 10:14 puts it in a single sentence: by one offering He has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. One offering. Not one plus your fourth. And it is His Spirit, not your repetition, who applies that one offering to a person; that is what He does, and He does not need you to keep bringing lambs.

I want to be careful, because I have seen this turned into a rule and it must not be. Nobody is banning you from praying. If you want to speak to God at the front of that hall, or in your seat, or in the car, speak to Him, tonight and every night; a person who talks to God has done nothing wrong. What is being taken off you is not the prayer. It is the obligation. It is the belief that the finished thing is waiting on your repetition before it counts. It is not. It was finished before you were born, and it was finished the first time you heard it, and it does not become more finished on the fourth walk.

And I am not going to tell you whether it took. That is not mine to say and it is not this page's; God settles that, not a writer, and He is not asking you to prove it to Him with your knees. What I can tell you is what He did, and where He is sitting, and that the ground under your feet in row eleven is a completed offering and not a half built one.

What sitting down looks like on a Tuesday

Here is what a builder knows about a finished job, and what Hebrews 10:14 says of His, the one the Spirit applies: you stop going back to it. Not because you have stopped caring; because there is nothing there for you to do. You sign, and you sit down, and you let the building be a building.

That is what assurance actually is. Not a feeling that finally arrives and stays. Not a memory of a prayer clear enough to stand on. It is sitting down beside a finished thing, on a Tuesday, without checking. Some mornings you will feel it and some mornings you will feel nothing at all, and neither morning changes where He is sitting.

You have been given a place to sit down, at the finished end of the work, and the seat was made by the one who did the work. He said it is finished with His own mouth, and it is written down in John 19:30, and His Spirit is the one who makes a finished thing stay finished in a person, so a morning when you feel nothing is not a morning the offering came undone. The offering is not the kind of thing that comes undone. It was made once, by Him, and He is not standing.