I Go Forward Every Time

She has never once gone forward for show and she would like that on the record.

She knows what it looks like from the outside. She has been in that congregation twenty-six years and she is always among the first up, and there are probably people who think she is the sort of woman who enjoys the front.

She is not. She goes because when somebody says come, she wants to.

And it has been genuine every single time. That is what she would say under oath. She has never gone forward feeling nothing and manufactured something on the way, and she has never gone because she thought somebody was watching.

The problem started about a year ago and it started with arithmetic, which she now wishes she had never done.

She worked out, roughly, that it has been the same thing.

Not every time. But the majority of them, over twenty-six years, have been about one thing in her. The same one. She has stood at that front and meant it, with her whole chest, about the same matter, something like sixty or seventy times.

And once she had that number she could not put it down.

Because what it looks like, from where she is standing now, is not twenty-six years of sincerity. It is sixty or seventy occasions on which she asked for something and it did not happen, and she came back and asked again, and the pattern is so long now that she has started to feel foolish at the exact moment she used to feel most honest.

And that is you at the front of your own room, or you would not still be reading.

The phrase Paul uses for how it comes

Let me give you the sentence and then look hard at three words in it.

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.2 Corinthians 3:18

Are being transformed. Present, continuous, ongoing. Not: have been transformed. Not: will be transformed at some future point. It is describing something in progress, which means it is describing a state that looks, from inside, like being unfinished.

From one degree to another. Degrees. Not a step. Not a moment. Not an event at a front.

This comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. The source is named, and it is not the person being transformed.

You are in a process that Scripture describes as happening by degrees, and degrees is not a word that fits a single occasion. It is written that we are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, and this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:18). The Holy Spirit does it in degrees, and sixty or seventy occasions is what a degree-by-degree process looks like from inside a life.

Now let me take the arithmetic seriously, because you did it honestly and I am not going to pretend the number is not real.

Sixty or seventy times, about one thing, over twenty-six years.

Here is what that number actually measures, and it is not what you think.

It measures how many times you have gone forward. That is the only variable in it. It contains no information whatsoever about what has been happening in you between the occasions, because nobody was counting that, and there is no instrument for counting it.

You have a count of your own going forward and no count of anything else, and you have been treating the one number you have as though it were the whole picture. It is written that the seed sprouts and grows, he knows not how (Mark 4:27), and the man in that parable has no figures at all. The Holy Spirit does not issue receipts.

And I want to say something about the sincerity itself, because you have started to hear it as the evidence against you and it is not.

You are a woman who has meant it sixty or seventy times, and meaning it that often about the same thing is not a record of failure. It is written that it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure (Philippians 2:13), and the willing is named as His work before the working is. The Holy Spirit put the wanting in you every one of those times, and a person who had stopped wanting would have stopped going.

Sixty or seventy times you got up. That is what the number says.