The Altar Call You Did Not Believe In

She gave the invitation on a Sunday in October the way you sign a form.

That is her own description and she has not softened it since. She said the words. She said them warmly, because she is warm, and because the people in that room deserve warmth whatever is going on in the person at the front. If there is anyone here this morning. You do not have to have it worked out. There is no wrong way to come.

And underneath, running alongside, in a completely separate channel, she was thinking about the chairs.

Specifically she was thinking that nobody was going to come, that the third row would look at their shoes the way the third row does, that she would leave a decent pause and then close it kindly so that nobody felt awkward, and that after the last song the chairs would need stacking because there was a thing in the hall on Monday.

She had written the whole moment off before she opened her mouth. She had done the arithmetic in the vestry beforehand and the arithmetic said no.

Nine people came forward.

Nine. In a room of about a hundred and ten. Two of them were teenagers, one of whom had been coming since March with his arms folded through every service; one was a man in his sixties she has prayed for since she arrived; one was a woman she had never seen before in her life and has not seen since.

And she stood there at the front with nine people in front of her, doing the thing she is very good at, saying the right words in the right voice, with a feeling in her chest that she has not been able to name until now and which is not joy.

It is shame. That is what it is. She has finally got the word for it. She stood in front of nine people who had just done the bravest thing they will do this year, and what she felt was the specific hot shame of a woman who had already decided about all nine of them from the vestry.

Look at whose mouth it went out of

Isaiah 55 is quoted so often that people have stopped noticing what the sentence actually says. Read it slowly, and read the whole clause, because the whole clause is where the freedom is.

So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.Isaiah 55:11

My word. Out of my mouth. Return unto me. Accomplish that which I please. Whereto I sent it.

Five first-person possessives in one verse, and not one of them is yours.

The word does not go out of your mouth in that sentence. It goes out of His, and it comes back to Him, and the report on whether it did anything is made to Him, and He is the one who decides what it accomplishes and where He sent it in the first place. The person speaking is not mentioned. That is not an insult. That is the load being lifted off a woman standing in a vestry doing arithmetic.

So hear this, over an October Sunday. Not one of those nine came because of your expectation, and not one of them stayed away because of your doubt. That is not my consolation for you; it is what His word says about whose mouth a word goes out of, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who takes five possessive pronouns and turns them into air in a woman's lungs.

Now look at the shame, because that is what has to come off.

The shame says: you were faithless, and God moved anyway, and that contrast is a rebuke. It has felt like a rebuke since October. But read what the verse makes the word depend on, and notice that expectancy in the speaker is not on the list. It is not there. It is not a hidden requirement and it is not a variable. It is the Holy Spirit, not anybody writing, who takes what is written and makes it land in the room you are actually in.

Which means the nine were not God moving in spite of you. They were God doing what the verse says He does with a word He sent, through a woman who was tired enough that morning to have quietly stopped expecting things, and He did not have to work around her to do it.

You are not disqualified by the arithmetic in the vestry. His word never once makes His work contingent on the confidence of the person carrying it, and the Holy Spirit was already in that room before you did the sums.

And here is the thing I most want you to have, because it goes deeper than October.

The reason you stopped expecting is not that you have become cynical. It is that you have watched, for years, from the front, and you have absorbed a great many Sundays where nothing visible happened, and a mind that has absorbed that many will start protecting itself by lowering the number. That is not sin. That is what happens to a person who stands in the same place and hopes for a long time.

You are held in that this morning. Not once you get your expectancy back. Now, in the middle of it, because Scripture says the word prospers in the thing whereto He sent it and puts the whole of that in His column, and the Holy Spirit has never left a room because the one at the front had gone quiet inside.

And the nine are not a reproach. They are nine people God wanted, gathered by a word that was never yours, standing in front of a woman He deliberately chose to say it.