The One Who Came for the Music

He came for the band. That is the whole truth of it and he has never dressed it up.

It was February, it was cold, and a girl from his shift said there was a thing on at the hall on a Thursday and the band was actually good. He went because he had nothing on and because he liked the girl and because it was warmer than his flat. He stood at the back with his coat on. He did not sing. When they asked people to close their eyes he did not close his eyes, because he was not going to be the kind of person who closed his eyes.

And somewhere in the third song something happened in his chest that he has never been able to describe to anybody, and at the end of the night he was standing in the doorway with his hands shaking, saying to a stranger, I do not know what this is, and the stranger said, come and sit down, and he sat down, and he prayed something. He does not remember all of it. He remembers saying sorry, and he remembers meaning it more than he has ever meant anything.

That was four years ago.

And here is what has eaten him ever since, quietly, the whole four years, and he has never asked anyone about it because of how it would sound. He did not come looking for God. He came for the band. He came for the girl, if he is being properly honest, and for the radiators. And every time somebody in that church gets up and tells a story about how they had been searching for years and reading everything and crying out to God in the dark, he thinks: that is a real one. That is somebody who came the right way.

So he has spent four years assuming that whatever happened to him has an asterisk on it. That he got in through a side door on a technicality, on a night when the music was good and he was lonely, and that one day somebody is going to look at the paperwork.

You may have come in a different door. But you have your asterisk. You came at a low point, or you came for somebody else's sake, or you came because you were frightened, and you have been grading your own motive ever since and marking yourself down.

Read the sentence and look for the clause that is not there

Let me say the pit as plainly as I can, and then I am going to get out of the way and let a verse do the work, because this is not a thing I can talk you into.

The pit is not doubt about Jesus. You have no doubt about Jesus. The pit is a suspicion about the transaction: that there is a standard of sincerity, that yours was contaminated by radiators and a girl and a good bass player, and that somewhere in heaven your file is marked came for the wrong reasons.

Now here is Jesus, speaking to a crowd who, and this is not a small detail, had followed Him across a lake because He had fed them. Their motive was lunch. He says so out loud a few verses earlier. And then, to those people, He says this.

All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.John 6:37

Read it for what is missing. There is no motive clause. There is no provided he came for the right reasons. There is no unless the music was involved. It is one of the widest sentences in the Bible and it was said, out loud, to a crowd who had turned up for a free meal.

You are inside a promise that never once asked why you came, and it is already settled, and it was spoken over people whose reasons were worse than yours. I am not softening this for you at the back of a hall. It is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a sentence said on a lakeshore into a room where a man is still holding his coat.

Motive is not the door. He is.

Here is the thing that has quietly gone wrong, and it is worth seeing clearly, because it is running your whole four years.

You have made your reason for coming into the mechanism. As though the sincerity generated the salvation, and therefore a weak sincerity generates a weak one, and a mixed sincerity generates a doubtful one. If that were true, then every person in that building is saved to the exact degree that they meant it, and nobody could ever be sure of anything, and the strongest Christian in the room would simply be the best at meaning things.

That is not the gospel. That is a sincerity meter with a cross drawn on the side of it.

The door is a Person. You have Christ Himself as the way in, and He is already the door, and He was the door on the night you came in out of the cold for a band. Scripture has Him saying I am the door (John 10:9), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a plain sentence like that stand up under a man who has been grading himself for four years.

What actually happened in the third song

And now let me say the good part, because there is a good part and nobody has said it to him.

He thinks he wandered in. He did not wander in. Look again at the first half of that verse: all that the Father giveth me shall come to me. Before the coming there is a giving, and the giving is the Father's. Which means that on a cold Thursday in February, when a girl from his shift mentioned a band, that was not the accident he has always taken it for.

You were drawn, and it was already happening before you knew what was happening, and the drawing was not yours to arrange. Scripture says no one comes unless the Father draws him (John 6:44), and the Holy Spirit is the one who was at work in a cold hall in February long before a man in a coat noticed anything in his chest.

Which flips the whole story. He has been telling it as: I came for the wrong reason and got in anyway. The truth is closer to: he was being come after, and God used a bass player and a warm room and a girl from his shift, because God has never been too proud to use whatever gets a man through a door.