He has a sentence he says at the end, and he has said it hundreds of times, and it works.
It is not a formula. He would resist that word. It is simply what he has found himself saying, over about twenty five years, to people who have just prayed for the first time and who look up afterward with the same expression, which is a question they have not put into words.
He says: this was not you. This was God, and it holds because He is holding it.
And you can watch it land. He has seen four hundred faces change on that sentence and he has never once got tired of it.
He is fifty two.
He was awake at four in the morning in March and here is what he was doing.
He was going over an evening from thirty one years ago, again, checking it. What he had understood at the time. Whether he had meant it in the right way. Whether a nineteen year old who was mostly frightened and mostly in love with a girl who had brought him along could really be said to have known what he was doing.
He does this perhaps four times a year and has for three decades and it always ends the same way, which is that he gets tired enough to sleep.
He has never once said his own sentence to himself.
That is the thing, and he saw it at about half past four, lying there. He has handed four hundred people the exact thing he needs and has never applied one word of it in his own direction, and it did not occur to him until he was fifty two that this was even a possibility.
You know the sentence. Yours may be shorter or different. But you know what it is to be able to hand somebody the very thing you are short of, and to have handed it out hundreds of times without ever noticing that you were carrying it past yourself.
The whole of the doing is on His side
Let me name the pit before we go to the verse, because if this becomes an article about assurance in general it will get large and useless.
The pit is narrow and it is this: you have a true sentence, and it is properly grounded, and you can deliver it to a stranger at eleven at night with total confidence, and there is no channel at all that points it inward. Twenty five years of one direction has built a pipe, and a pipe does not have a tap on it.
Here is the verse your sentence has been standing on the whole time, whether or not you have ever quoted it.
That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.John 3:6
Look at where the doing sits, since that is what you have been telling people.
Flesh produces flesh. The Spirit produces spirit. That is the whole mechanism, and there is nothing in the sentence about the person born: not what they understood at the time, not what they meant, not how frightened they were, and not who brought them along.
A nineteen year old who was mostly frightened is not mentioned in that verse, and neither is a nineteen year old who was entirely composed, because the verse is not about the one being born.
Take that at four in the morning, and know it is not my reassurance, it is the sentence you have been handing out for twenty five years. This was not you, and it holds because He is holding it. John 3:6 puts the whole of the doing on the Spirit, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the birthing, and He did not make it contingent on a young man's clarity.
And here I draw the line this site always draws, in the same breath. God is neither male nor female. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and He is not a woman either; He is spirit. The birth language in John is one of the ways Scripture describes Him with a mother's picture beside a father's, and both are His own, and it does not make the Spirit a woman and it does not make God a goddess.
I am not going to pronounce on your standing, and you would not want me to; you have spent twenty five years refusing to do that to other people from any platform. What I am pointing at is the mechanism, and the mechanism is the one you already preach.
Somebody has to turn you round, and this article is the person doing it, and there is no more to it than that.
You are allowed to be on the receiving end of your own sentence, and you were the one it applied to the whole time. John 3:6 puts the whole of the doing on the Spirit and says nothing about the one being born, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the holding, which does not depend on a man reconstructing an evening from thirty one years ago.
You are not short of the truth. You have more of it than nearly anybody and it is correctly held and you have never once misused it.
You have been standing side on to yourself for twenty five years.
So say your own sentence, out loud, in your own direction. That is the whole of tonight and it will be considerably harder than it sounds, because a man delivering a sentence and a man receiving one are doing two different things and only one of them has ever been practiced.
This was not you, and it holds because He is holding it. That is John 3:6 put where it has never been put, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the holding, and He does not require a man to reconstruct an evening from thirty one years ago in order to still be doing it.
And about the four times a year.
I am not going to promise you it stops in March. It has been going three decades and it may well come round again, and if it does, that is not a failure of this article or of you.
You are inside your own sentence, and you were inside it every time you said it to somebody else. John 3:6 puts the whole of the doing on the Spirit and says nothing about the one being born, and it is the Holy Spirit who holds it, without any evening being reconstructed first.
What I would ask is this: the next time you are awake at four checking an evening from thirty one years ago, say your own sentence out loud into the dark before you get tired enough to sleep. That is all. It changes what the four in the morning is for.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud on the step. You are in Christ, and the authority to speak over three decades of checking is delegated to you in Him; it does not depend on your being able to reconstruct an evening at nineteen. These stand on what is written in John and are carried by the Holy Spirit, not by your recall. What He gives you to rest in, and when, is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own timing.
- Sentence I have said to four hundred people, you were true every single time and you were never once said to me, and I say it now in the name of Jesus. John 3:6 says that which is born of the Spirit is spirit, and the whole of the doing is on His side.
- Night I have gone back to check four times a year for thirty years, you are not where this is settled and you never were. It is written that the verse says nothing at all about the one being born, and His Spirit is the one who holds it, which does not depend on what a frightened nineteen year old understood.
- Lord, You are neither male nor female, and You give birth by Your Spirit. I say my own sentence out loud in my own direction tonight, and I am not examining afterward whether it landed.
John 3:6
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