Numbered Lockers and Plastic Chairs

Everything goes in the locker. Keys, phone, the coins out of your pocket. There is a wristband with a key on it that is slightly too tight for a grown man's wrist and slightly too loose for a child's, and locker forty-one is his because forty-one is the one he got the first time and he has asked for it every time since.

Plastic chairs bolted together in rows of five. A vending machine that takes cards now, which was a great improvement about which there was a good deal of comment. A woman on the desk who has done this job for eleven years and has a way of saying names that takes about half the fear out of a room.

Twenty minutes early, because you are always twenty minutes early.

He comes once a month to see his brother. It is a long drive and it is a good visit and it is worth every mile, and this waiting room, which was a hard place the first two or three times, is now simply a place where he waits.

And he has not prayed anywhere, in that room or anywhere else, for about two years.

Not out of anger. He is not angry with God and it is not a crisis of anything. It is that somewhere in a bad stretch of his own, a good while back, he acquired the idea that a person has to arrange his own way in. That there is a process, and that he has not completed it, and that turning up without having completed it is the sort of thing that gets a man turned round at a desk.

Sit down on the row with me, friend. Today I am speaking to the one who did something a long way back, took it to God straight and meant every word, and now thinks the way in is his to arrange.

And before you brace: naming anything is not a condition here, and not naming it is not avoidance, and I will not once suggest otherwise.

The word Paul uses is about being introduced

There is a sentence in Romans where Paul describes how a person gets in, and he uses a very particular word, and the word does the whole job.

By whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand.Romans 5:2

Access. The Greek is prosagoge, and it is a court word. It is what happened when somebody was brought in and presented to a king. And the thing about that word is that it never describes a person walking in on their own account. It describes a person being brought.

There was always somebody who did the bringing. A man with standing at that court took you in, and his standing was the whole of your admission, and it did not matter whether you personally were the sort of person who would ever have got past the door.

By whom. Paul names the one doing the introducing at the front of the sentence, and it is Christ, and it was never you.

You are brought in and presented by Christ Himself, and you were never the one arranging your own admission. I am not offering you an easier system. The written word uses a word that requires an introducer and names Him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it into a man on a bolted plastic chair.

Wherein we stand

And then the last three words, which are the ones to take home with you.

Wherein we stand.

Not wherein we visit. Not wherein we are permitted for a period. Stand is a settled word. It is where a man's feet are, and the whole clause describes grace as a place he is already standing in rather than a room he is trying to get into.

Which means the entire two years have been spent trying to gain entry to somewhere you were already standing.

I do not say that to make the two years look foolish. Nobody told you. And a man who has been taught, however accidentally, that there is a process, will go on working the process for as long as it takes, because that is what a decent man does.

You are standing in grace right now, and you were standing in it through both of the years you spent trying to get in. Scripture uses a standing word for the place and an introducing word for the way in, and it is His Spirit, not a completed process, who lets a man notice the floor under his own feet.