She Testifies and Sits Down

Sunday night and the place is full. People standing along the back wall, the doors propped because of the heat, somebody's baby doing an excellent job of not being taken out. The band has finished and the room is still up on its feet from the last song, and the pastor comes to the front and says, before we go on, I want you to hear something.

And he says her name.

She stands up out of the fourth row with the microphone already coming down the line to her, hand to hand, over shoulders, the way it does. She does not go to the front. She has done this enough times that she knows she does better from where she is standing.

And she tells it. Four minutes, maybe five. She is not showy about it. She names the year, she names what was true of her then, she names the night it turned, and she says the sentence she always says at the end, which is that she was bought and she did not pay for any of it.

The room comes apart. Properly, the way a room does when something real has been said in it. Somebody at the back shouts. A woman two rows over is crying into the sleeve of her cardigan. The pastor has both hands up.

And she sits straight back down.

She passes the microphone to the man on her left without looking at him. She smooths her dress under her. She puts both hands in her lap. And she is there for the next fifty minutes, and she does not say another word.

Now watch the rest of that meeting, because this is the part nobody watches.

A girl in the row in front of her, maybe nineteen, sits through the whole rest of the service with her arms folded and her jaw set, and she is not crying and she is not singing, and something is going on in her that anybody with eyes could see from four feet away.

And the woman who was bought sees it. Of course she sees it. She sees it the whole hour.

And she does not say anything, because in her own understanding of herself, she has already given what she has. Her part came and went in five minutes. She is the one who was bought. That is the offer. That is the whole of the offer. She has told them how bad it was and how completely He got her out, and now the useful part of the evening, as far as she is concerned, is over, and the rest of it belongs to people who have something to give.

You know this. Maybe you have never held a microphone in your life. But you know what it is to be genuinely, gladly rescued, and to believe that the rescue is the only thing about you that anybody could ever need. You know what it is to have a testimony and no commission, a past tense and no present one, one sentence and then your hands in your lap.

Evidence sits down, an ambassador is sent

Paul writes one line about what a bought person actually is, and it is not the line most of us have been living in.

Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God.2 Corinthians 5:20

Read what he does not say. He does not say we are exhibits for Christ. He does not say we are evidence, or proof, or examples, or illustrations of what God can do with a wreck.

Evidence is looked at. Evidence sits in the room and is pointed to and it does not have a job beyond being what it is. An ambassador is sent. An ambassador opens his mouth in the country he was sent to and what he says carries the full weight of the kingdom that sent him, and everybody in the room knows it.

You are an ambassador and not an exhibit, and the difference is that one of you is sent. Scripture says we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making His appeal through us, and it is the Holy Spirit, not confidence and not personality, who makes a sentence out of a woman's mouth land in a nineteen year old with her arms folded.

And look at the middle of the verse, because it is the most astonishing four words in the sentence. As though God did beseech you by us. God pleading, through her. Not God being talked about. God speaking, in a room, using the voice of the woman in the fourth row with her hands in her lap.

You have been given a voice that carries something other than your own history. It is written that God has committed to us the word of reconciliation, and the same Spirit who raised Christ from the dead is the one who puts weight into an ordinary sentence said across an aisle.

A commission is never a repayment

Now I have to guard this, because this is exactly where a message like this goes wrong, and when it goes wrong it does real damage.

The moment you hear the word purpose, something in you starts doing arithmetic. He bought me, so now I owe Him a life of usefulness. He got me out, so the least I can do is spend the rest of it working. And there it is: the whole thing turned back into a payment, and the woman who was set free at nineteen is on a treadmill at forty-five and calling it calling.

That is not what an ambassador is. An ambassador is not working off his citizenship. Nobody in an embassy is repaying anything. He was made a citizen and then he was sent, and the sending is not the invoice for the citizenship, it is what citizens of that kingdom get to do.

You are sent, and you are not settling anything by going. His word says we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets you hear the word prepared as a gift rather than as a demand.

Read that phrase slowly, because it closes the trap: God prepared them beforehand. Before you. Before the year you name in your testimony. The work was made ready and then you were bought and then you were walked into it, and at no point in that order does anything you do come back and pay for anything He did.

You are holding a commission and not a bill, and nothing in your hands tonight is you settling up. It is written that the gifts and calling of God are without repentance, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the word gift keep meaning gift in a woman who has spent years converting every good thing into something owed.

And the record stands. All of it. The year you name, the night it turned, the thing you were and would rather not have been: none of that is being tidied away, and I am not going to ask you to stop telling it. The record stands and the verdict is changed, and now, on top of the changed verdict, there is a sending, which is the part nobody ever told you about.