Nine Days

She has the date in her phone. Not saved as anything. Just a note with a date in it, and she has never deleted it and she has never opened it in front of anybody.

That was the night she went down at the altar. Not walked forward, went down, on her face on the carpet in front of the whole church, with the organ going and two mothers of the church with their hands on her back, and she cried in a way she has not cried before or since. And she told God, out loud, into the carpet, that she was done with it. Done. Finished. She swore it. She meant every syllable with everything that was in her, and there was a lot in her that night.

Nine days.

She can tell you what day it broke and where she was standing and what she said to herself while she did it.

That was four years ago and she has not been back to an altar. She goes to church. She sits about two thirds of the way back, and she sings, and when the call comes she stays exactly where she is, and everybody assumes she is fine, and she is not fine, she is a woman who found out that she could go all the way down on her face in front of God and mean it entirely and still only last nine days.

You have a number. Maybe not nine. Maybe it was a weekend, or four months, or one afternoon. And the number is not really the problem. The problem is what the number seemed to prove about you, and you have been walking around under that proof ever since.

What she thinks nine days proved

Let me get under this thing, because there are two floors to it and only one of them gets talked about.

The top floor is shame, and shame is loud, and shame is not what is keeping her two thirds of the way back. Shame she could handle. She was raised in a house where you handled shame.

The bottom floor is the conclusion, and here it is: if that night was not enough, nothing I have is enough. She brought God the most she has ever had. Everything. The full weight of a whole person, on the floor, in front of witnesses, with tears that were not performance. And it produced nine days. So what would she bring now? A quieter version? A less sincere one? She has nothing bigger in the house.

That is why she sits down when the call comes. Not because she does not want to go. Because she has already spent the biggest thing she owns and it did not hold.

Now come with me to Romans, chapter three, and let me show you a question Paul asks with his whole chest.

For what if some did not believe? shall their unbelief make the faith of God without effect? God forbid: yea, let God be true, but every man a liar.Romans 3:3-4

You are held by a faithfulness that nine days did not dent and could not cancel. Romans 3:3 asks whether our unbelief makes the faith of God without effect and answers with the strongest refusal Paul has, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept His side of it while you kept none of yours.

What did nine days do to His side?

Ask Paul's question about your own night. What if some did not believe? What if some meant it entirely and lasted nine days?

Shall that make the faith of God of no effect?

And Paul does not reason his way to an answer. He shouts one. God forbid. Absolutely not. May it never be. The Greek there is the strongest refusal he has, and he keeps it for the moments where a wrong idea would do real damage, and this is one of them.

You are held by a faithfulness that your nine days did not touch, did not dent and could not cancel. That is exactly what Romans 3:3 is asking and answering, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes Paul's shout out of a letter and puts it in a room where a woman is sitting two thirds of the way back.

Then read the next line, because it is the whole gospel in eight words. Let God be true, but every man a liar.

That is not an insult. That is a floor. Paul is saying: settle it, decide it, put it beyond argument. God's truthfulness is the fixed point, and human unreliability is simply the weather. If your reliability were ever going to be the fixed point, nobody would have made it out of the book of Genesis.

You have never been the fixed point in this and you were never asked to be. The word puts it plainly, and that is what let God be true means, and the Spirit of God has been holding that floor under you through four years of you assuming the floor was yours.

The altar is not a machine

Now let me say something to the woman who thinks she spent her biggest offering.

An altar is not a machine that converts intensity into permanence. It never was. You did not underpay. There is no amount of weeping that buys nine years instead of nine days, and if there were, then the people with the loudest cries would be the holiest people in the building, and you have been in church long enough to know exactly how untrue that is.

What happened on that carpet was real. God was there. He received you. And He was not startled nine days later, because He is not learning about you as He goes.

You are known all the way to the bottom by a God who was never running an experiment on you. Scripture says He knows what we are made of and does not deal with us after our sins, and the Holy Spirit was on that carpet with you and He has been in the two thirds row every Sunday since.

And no, I am not going to walk you through the four years. Not one Sunday of it. A list is a courtroom with the chairs moved, and this house does not have one.