How Many Times Have I Started

Tamika has gone forward nine times that she can count and she thinks the real number is eleven.

Not in nine different churches. Mostly the same one, over about fourteen years, and the ushers know her and are lovely about it and have never once let anything show on their faces.

And here is the thing people get wrong about her: she is not going up because she does not believe.

She believes. She has believed the whole time. She reads it, she prays, she has led a girls' group for four years and she is good at it and the girls tell her things they do not tell their mothers.

She goes up because she cannot remember whether the first one held.

That is all it is. Somewhere back at the beginning there was a night, and she was fifteen, and she has spent fourteen years unable to be sure that she meant it properly. Did she feel enough. Did she understand what she was doing. Were the words right. She has gone back over that fifteen-year-old's evening the way you go back over a door you might not have locked.

And every time an invitation is given, some part of her says: do it again. Just to be sure. It costs nothing.

Except it has cost her fourteen years of never once resting.

The last time, in the spring, Sister Ellis came and prayed with her, and Sister Ellis has prayed with her at least four times before and has never mentioned it.

And she prayed the whole prayer, properly, and then she held on to Tamika's hands a bit longer and said, quietly, so nobody else heard:

"Baby. How many times are you going to ask Him for something He already gave you?"

And Tamika started to answer and could not.

And Sister Ellis said, "You are not coming forward. You are checking."

Her boy is seven. His friend's mother left in the winter, and for about a week after that he asked Tamika, every single night, whether she was going to be there in the morning.

Every night. Same question.

And she said yes, every night, and she was not annoyed once, and on the sixth night she was lying in the dark afterward and she thought: I would say it a thousand times.

And then, right behind that, the other thing:

But it was true the first night.

Now let me ask you what number yours is.

Because if this is you there is a count, and there is a specific old evening you keep going back to, and you have never told anybody that you cannot remember whether it worked.

Two halves of one sentence

Jesus says something in John 6 with two halves, and most people only ever quote the second one.

All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will certainly not cast out.John 6:37

Take the first half first, because it is the one that settles your question.

All that the Father gives Me will come to Me.

The coming is downstream of the giving. Whoever is coming is coming because they were given, and the giving happened somewhere you were not present for and cannot audit. That means the thing you have been trying to verify by memory was never anything you did in the first place.

You have been auditing your own performance in a transaction where the decisive move was the Father's.

And then the second half, and look at how strong the wording is.

I will certainly not cast out. That is a double negative in the Greek, the strongest way that language has of saying never. Jesus is not saying He would prefer not to. He is closing a door and locking it and putting the key somewhere you cannot reach, on purpose, because He knew people like you would come along and want to check.

And notice what the qualification is not. It does not say the one who comes to Me having felt it sufficiently. It does not say the one who comes with the correct wording. It says the one who comes.

You came. You came at fifteen and you came again at nineteen and you came in the spring, and every single one of those is inside the sentence.

So hear this said over you, on a front pew with the lights half off. You are held by a decision the Father made and a promise the Son gave, and the checking you have done for fourteen years has never once been what was keeping you in. That is written in Jesus' own words in the strongest form of never that language has, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the seal and the guarantee, and the sealing is done by God on His own initiative and not renewed by you at intervals.

Now let me take the blame off you, because I do not want you to walk away from this thinking you were foolish.

Going forward again is not a sin and it never was.

Nobody has been rolling their eyes at you. Sister Ellis prayed with you four times before she said anything, and she said it gently, and she said it because she loves you and not because she was tired of you.

And there is nothing wrong with the wanting. A woman who keeps walking toward Jesus for fourteen years is not somebody with a problem. There are people who have stopped walking anywhere, and you are not one of them, and it is worth saying plainly that the direction you have been going every single time is the right one.

The problem was never the walking. It is what you thought the walking was for.

You have been going up to establish something, and it was already established. Every trip up that aisle has been you asking God to redo a piece of work He completed before you were born, and He has met you every time and been kind every time, and not one of those nights was the night it started, because the night it started is not in your biography at all.

Your boy asked six nights running because he was frightened, and you never once got tired of him. But the answer did not become more true on the sixth night. It was fully true on the first, and what he needed in the end was not a better answer, it was to be able to sleep.

The word says these things are written so that you may know that you have eternal life, and know is God's own choice of word there, not hope. And the Spirit of God is the one who bears witness with your spirit that you are a child of God, which means the assurance you have been trying to generate for fourteen years is something He supplies.

That is the whole reason this tradition has ever taught about God choosing. Not so that anybody would go home and examine themselves into the ground. So that a woman who has been up nine times could sit down.