She has a plan and the plan has an order to it, and the order is the problem.
First, she gets out of it. Whatever the current situation is, she brings it to an end, or at least gets it to a place where it is clearly ending. Second, she gives it a bit of time, because anybody can have a good fortnight and a fortnight proves nothing. Third, when there is a stretch behind her that she could point to, she comes to God about the whole thing.
That is the order. She has never written it down and she could recite it in her sleep.
And she has been at step one for three years.
Now, I want to be exact about her, because a woman with a plan like that is often described unfairly. She is not stalling. She has genuinely tried to end it, more than once, and there have been stretches. What has not happened is a stretch long enough to satisfy step two, and each time it breaks the clock resets, and so step three has never once arrived.
Which means the thing she wants most has been permanently postponed by a sequence she invented.
And underneath the sequence is a picture, and the picture is what I actually want to deal with. In the picture, God receives people who are on their way out of something. Not people in the middle of it. In the middle you are still an active participant, and there is something indecent, she feels, about coming to Him with the thing still going on, as though you were asking Him to be present in a room He should not have to be in.
That is you at step one.
You've got an order of operations, and the first item is one you have never completed, and the whole plan is stalled behind it. And underneath is a picture of a God who arrives after the situation rather than during it.
The whole verse turns on the timing
Paul writes a sentence that people quote for the middle clause, and I want you to look at the first four words, because they are the ones doing the work you need.
But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.Romans 5:8
While we were yet.
That is a statement about timing and it is unmistakable. Not after. Not once there was a stretch to point to. Not when the situation was clearly ending. While.
Paul is not describing a God who waits for a person to be on the way out of something before He moves. He is describing a God whose defining act was performed in the middle of it, at the point where nothing had improved and no clock had started running.
You are loved in the middle of it, which is the timing the verse names and the only timing it names, and I am not going soft on anything: Romans 5:8 says while we were yet, in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my volume who can get that into a woman stuck at step one.
Look also at the word commendeth, which in that older English means demonstrates or proves. Paul is arguing. He is saying: here is the evidence that God loves you, and the evidence is the timing. The whole force of his sentence depends on the love arriving at the worst possible moment rather than a convenient one.
Which means that if you wait until you are out of it, you will have arrived after the thing the verse is actually about.
You have a love that chose the middle deliberately, and it did that as its proof rather than in spite of itself, which is written into the logic of the verse rather than into my encouragement, with the Spirit of God able to reach three years of a stalled plan that argument has not shifted.
Now here is where my own tradition helps, and I say it plainly. We do not wait for people to be finished before we make a noise about them. If somebody comes into a room of ours mid situation, still in it, nothing resolved, we are loud about them that day, because a person can hold a welcome given in the middle far better than one given at the end.
The end has a way of never arriving. The middle is where people actually live.
This is yours today, at step one, with the situation still going on and no clock running, because Scripture puts the timing at while, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a hall on a Saturday.
Come in the middle.
Your order of operations was invented by you, in good faith, out of a sense that it would be indecent to arrive unfinished. And Paul's sentence makes the middle the point rather than the problem: the evidence he offers that God loves you is precisely that the love turned up while nothing had improved.
Step one has not completed in three years, and step three has been waiting behind it, and the whole time the verse has been describing a God who was already there at the worst moment rather than waiting past it.
You are met while it is still going on, and while is the word the verse uses, because Romans 5:8 puts the timing before the clause everybody quotes, and the Holy Spirit is the one making that a door you can walk through today.
Come with it still going on. That is when He came.
Declare this over yourself
Say them out loud, in whatever voice today has left you. The standing to say them is not something you work up to and it is not on loan from a clean stretch: Christ is in you, and the authority in these words belongs to Him and has been given to you in Scripture, made living by the Holy Spirit rather than by where you are in your own plan. Jesus put the faith required at a mustard seed, which is His way of setting it under the line where anybody would trouble to measure, and then He said the part that carries: speak to the mountain. The mountain here is not the situation. It is the order of operations. Speak to that. What He does with everything else He does in His own way, and the lowering of the arms is yours to do today.
- Waiting to be out of it first, you are not the timing, and in the name of Jesus I come while it is still going on. Scripture says while we were yet, and while is a word about the middle and never about the aftermath.
- Fear that arriving unfinished is indecent, you have had three years and step one is still not done. Scripture offers the timing as the proof of the love, so the moment you keep calling wrong is the moment God chose to make His case in.
- Lord God, You came at the worst possible point and You called that the demonstration, and I am standing here with my arms down and nothing finished. I thank You, because Your Holy Spirit did the drawing and Your word said while, and I am received mid situation and not at the end of a plan I made up.
Romans 5:8
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