Everybody Up But Her

The organ goes to the shout chord about six minutes in, and Sister Beulah is already on her feet in the second row because Sister Beulah is always on her feet, and the drummer picks it up and the whole room goes.

Everybody goes.

Renelle is in the fourth row on the aisle and she is standing because everybody is standing, and her hands are at her sides, and there is nothing at all going on inside her.

She is not upset. She wants that understood. Nothing bad has happened this week and she is not in a fight with anybody and she slept fine. The room is loud and glad and she is glad the room is glad and she means every word being sung.

She just cannot find it.

She has been in this church twenty seven years. She knows what it is to be caught up in a praise break and she is not one of those people who thinks it is undignified. She has been down the front with her shoes off.

There was a thing years ago. She dealt with it. She believes she is forgiven and she would say so flat out to anybody who asked, including the pastor, including her mother.

And the room is up, and she is standing there, and it is not landing anywhere.

If you have ever stood in the middle of that, this is written for you. And I want to hand you an accounting word and then a man who deliberately refused to look at the evidence.

Reckoned is a bookkeeping word

Romans 4 is built on a single verb and everything in the chapter turns on it.

It is reckoned. Counted. Credited. It is a bookkeeping term and Paul uses it eleven times in that chapter, which is not the behavior of a man being casual with vocabulary.

To reckon something to an account is to enter it. It is an act of the one keeping the books, performed on a ledger, and the thing entered does not have to be produced by the account holder. That is the entire point of the chapter. Paul is arguing that Abraham did not manufacture righteousness and hand it in. It was credited to him.

And then, right in the middle of that argument, Paul reaches for a psalm.

Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered.

He quotes it as an illustration of the accounting. This, he says, is what a credited entry looks like from the inside of a life: forgiven, covered, and nothing produced by the one it happened to.

You have an entry made on your account by the one keeping the books, and nothing about it was manufactured by you. Romans 4:7 sits inside an argument about crediting rather than producing, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written entry and makes it real in a person, so this does not rest on what is or is not happening in the fourth row.

And now think about what an accounting entry feels like at the moment it is made, which is the question underneath this whole article.

It does not feel like anything. Entries are silent. Somewhere right now, in some system, a figure is being credited to somebody who is asleep, and it will be entirely true when they wake up and they will not have felt a thing while it happened.

You were credited in silence, and silence is the ordinary manner in which entries are made. It is written as an act of bookkeeping and not as an event with an interior, and His Spirit is the one carrying a written entry into a life, which is why it holds while a room is going and nothing is landing.

He considered not his own body

Now the part of the chapter I want most to put in your hands, and it is about where Abraham refused to look.

Paul says that Abraham, being about a hundred years old, considered not his own body.

That word considered means examined, took into account, weighed as evidence. And Paul says he did not. Not that he was unaware of it. He was a hundred. He knew exactly what his own body was like. He simply declined to enter it as evidence in the matter, because he had a word from God about the matter and he judged that the word was the better instrument.

That is not denial. Denial is pretending the evidence is not there. This is a man looking straight at the evidence and declining to treat it as authoritative.

And that is precisely the move available to a woman standing still in the fourth row.

She knows what is going on in her. She is not confused about it. What she is entitled to do is decline to enter it as evidence about her standing, because she has a word about her standing, and the word is the better instrument.

You are entitled to look straight at what is going on in you and decline to enter it as evidence. Scripture says of Abraham that he considered not his own body while looking directly at it, and the same Spirit at work in that chapter is the one testifying inside a person now.

Something belongs here in the middle, in plain sight. If the standing still has stretched into something heavier, if the nights have been getting long, or if the thinking has traveled past the flatness and out toward wishing to be gone, get a person alongside you. Talk to your doctor. Sit down with a counselor. If today is a dark one, call or text 988 or your local crisis line and let another human being be with you in it. That is not a lesser road than prayer and it is not a fault in anybody's faith. God has always worked through people, and one sitting beside you is part of what He is doing rather than an alternative to it.

Standing still is not unbelief

Now here is the thing I would most want said over me in the fourth row, and I want to say it plainly because I think a great many people have quietly been carrying the opposite.

Standing still in the middle of a praise break is not unbelief.

Unbelief is a decision about what is true. It is not a reading on a meter. A woman who could tell you exactly what God has done, who would say it to her pastor and her mother without a flicker, is not in unbelief. She is in a body on a morning when nothing is moving, which is a completely different thing and has never once been listed anywhere as a sin.

And a room full of people who are having a wonderful time are not further along than she is. That is worth saying out loud in a building like ours. Nobody in there got a better verdict this morning. The credit on every account in that room was entered on exactly the same basis, and none of them produced it either.

You are standing on identical ground with every person on their feet around you, and not one of them received a better entry. Romans 4:7 quotes the same blessing over everybody in the argument without grading anyone, and the Spirit takes what is written and makes it living in a body.

I am not going to tell you it comes back next Sunday. I do not know. It usually does. It might not for a season, and there are saints who have gone through long dry stretches and come out the other side with more than they went in with, and they were not doing anything wrong in the middle of it.

You are clean right now with your hands at your sides, and your hands at your sides have never once been a witness. It is written and it is entered, and it is His Spirit rather than the strength of your agreement who makes an entered thing real in a body.