The Back Row Every Week

Back row on the left, by the pillar, which is the seat everybody in every church knows about and which is nearly always taken by somebody who has been sitting there for years.

Hymn books at the end of the pew with covers that have gone soft. A radiator that comes on with a knock about ten minutes in. A view, from there, of the backs of about ninety heads, which is a different service from the one people at the front are at, and better in several ways.

Five years she has sat there.

She stands for the songs. She sings, properly, and she has a good voice and one or two people near her have noticed. She listens all the way through the sermon and could tell you what it was about on a Wednesday. She stays for coffee about half the time and she has friends in that building.

She has not prayed in there once.

Not in five years. Not the corporate ones, where she stands quietly and lets them go past her, and not on her own, and not in the car in the car park, and not on the walk home.

And the reason is a conclusion she reached a long time ago, out of something another person did to her, and the conclusion is that whatever it is God comes near to, it is not the state she is in. She would not put it that way. She would say she is not really in the right place for that.

Let me say who I am speaking to. Today I am speaking to you, the one carrying what somebody else did. I will not ask you what it was, and nothing here wants the thing itself.

And before you brace for it: nothing here makes naming it a condition of anything, and not naming it is not avoidance, and I will not have it called that.

The verse gives your condition as the address

There is a line in Psalm 34 that most people know and almost nobody reads as a location.

The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.Psalm 34:18

Read it as an address rather than as a consolation.

It does not say the Lord is near to the sorted. It does not say He draws near once a person has recovered. It names a condition and it says that is where He is found, and the condition it names is brokenness.

Contrite in that verse is the Hebrew for crushed. Not sorry. Crushed. It is a word for something that has been broken small under a weight.

So the state you have been treating as the disqualification is the one the psalm gives as the postcode.

And I want to be careful, because there is a cheap way of preaching this that romanticizes being broken, and I am not doing that. Being crushed is not good and God does not think it is good. The verse is not praising the condition. It is telling you where He goes.

You are in the exact place God is named as being near to, and you were never outside anything because of your condition. I am not being kind to you at the cost of the text. The written word names a state and locates His nearness in it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it to a woman in the back row by a pillar.

Look at what the psalm was written out of

Now the part that settles it, and it is sitting right at the top of the psalm where nobody looks.

Psalm 34 has a heading. It says David wrote it when he changed his behavior before Abimelech, who drove him away, and he departed.

That is the polite version. Go and read what actually happened. David was in enemy territory, recognized, terrified, and he escaped by pretending to be out of his mind in front of a foreign king. Scratching at a gate. Letting his spit run down his beard. It is one of the most humiliating episodes in the life of anybody in Scripture, and he is a grown man and an anointed king and it is in the book.

And out of that, that same man wrote a psalm about God being near to the crushed.

He was not writing from a study afterward, having got himself in order. He was writing as somebody who knew exactly what it is to be in a state you would not want on your record.

You are held by a God whose nearness was reported by a man in a state he would not have chosen, and you were never required to write from the other side of anything. Scripture puts the incident in the heading and the promise in the body, and it is His Spirit who makes a promise written out of humiliation land on a person carrying one.