The Priest Who Sat Down

Eleven adults are sitting in a primary school classroom on a Wednesday evening, in chairs built for eight year olds, and the woman at the front says the phrase once more and waits for them to give it back.

It is a beginners' class in a language none of them grew up with, and the phrase is nothing special. It is the one for asking a stranger the way to the station. She says it. They say it. She says it again, slower, and taps her ear, and they say it again, and somebody's knee knocks the underside of a desk built for a child, in a building that emptied out at half three.

By the fifteenth time, the thing happens that happens in every class of this kind. The sounds come loose from the meaning. A man in the second row hears his own mouth making them and feels absolutely nothing, and it is not boredom and it is not doubt. The phrase has simply gone flat, the way any word goes flat when you say it and say it and say it. Somebody at the back laughs, because it has stopped being a sentence and turned into noise.

The teacher is not troubled by this at all. Repetition is how a mouth learns a shape it was not born knowing, and going numb partway through is not a fault in the phrase and not a fault in the man. In the morning, when he is actually standing on a corner needing the station, the words will be there and they will mean exactly what they always meant.

You've felt precisely that, and not in a classroom.

You have a sentence you've said to God about one thing, and you know it by heart, and somewhere in the years it came loose from itself. You can hear yourself saying it now, the same words in the same order, going out into the same quiet. And here is the part you've never said out loud to anybody: you've been reading that flatness as a verdict. If the words feel like nothing, perhaps they did nothing. Perhaps the first fifty landed and the rest have been falling short. So you say it again the next night, more carefully, hoping to feel it, and the wear goes on.

Nobody is standing at the front of that room asking you for it again. That has been your own voice, for years.

Count the furniture in the tent

Let me say what I think you're actually carrying, because I do not think it is what a stranger would guess.

You're not lying awake unsure whether God forgives people. Ask you about anybody else and you would answer without hesitating. What has worn you down is the sound of yourself. It is the tiredness of a person who has brought the same thing so many times that they can no longer tell whether they are praying or reciting, and who has begun to suspect that the reciting is proof of something wrong with them.

So let me take you into a room in Scripture, because the Word has already said something exact about this, and it says it with furniture.

The tent in the wilderness is described in extraordinary detail. Cubits, boards, rings, poles, the exact number of loops. A table. A lampstand. An altar, and another altar. A basin for washing. Everything named and everything measured. And in all of that inventory, in the holy place where the priest did his work, there is nothing to sit on. No chair, no bench, no stool. The letter to the Hebrews tells you plainly why, and then it turns the whole thing over in a single line.

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

Hold those two postures against each other, because everything is in the difference.

Standing daily. Offering oftentimes the same sacrifices. That is the phrase I want in your hands tonight, because it is the exact shape of your last however many years: the same offering, brought again, brought again, brought again. And notice what the verse says was wrong with it. Not that the priest did not mean it. Not that his heart was cold or his words worn thin. The trouble was never the sincerity of the man standing there. It was that the arrangement itself could not finish.

Then: He sat down.

He did not sit because He was weary. A man sits when the work is done. There was nothing to sit on in the old tent because nothing there was ever finished, and there is a seat at the right hand of God because something was.

Now bring your flat words back and lay them next to that.

If the offering was made once and made for ever, then the deadness in your mouth was never a verdict on it. It was wear. A sentence said a thousand times wears smooth the way the middle of a stone step wears down under feet, and the hollow in the stone tells you only how many times somebody crossed it. It tells you nothing whatever about whether the door at the top is open.

The door is open. It has been open since the sitting down.

And this is not ancient history that stopped being true. God is doing this tonight, in ordinary rooms, for ordinary people who assumed they had used up their allowance of being heard. He is doing it in the room you're in. It is not for whoever you imagine is further along than you. It is for you, personally, in the state you're actually in.

So I am not going to ask you to bring it again. Not tonight, not tomorrow with more feeling, not once you've worked yourself up to meaning it properly. That request is the very thing that has exhausted you, and it never came from Him.

A few lines further on, the same letter says something that ends the argument: their sins and their lawless deeds He remembers no more. He closed the account Himself. Which means the record you've been reading from at night is not His record. It is yours, in your own handwriting, kept faithfully by the only person still keeping it. And you kept it out of reverence, not rebellion. People who do not care never keep records at all.

Nothing about the number of times has ever moved Him one inch toward the door.

You have a matter that was closed at a sitting down and has not reopened since. Scripture puts the offering once and for ever, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can stop a hand reaching for it again tonight.