He was seventeen and it was a tent, and there were about six hundred people, and he does not remember the preaching at all.
He remembers the walk. He remembers that the grass was wet through his shoes and that a man he did not know put a hand between his shoulder blades, and that somebody prayed with him and then wrote his name in a book and gave him a card with a verse on it.
And he remembers being told, plainly and kindly, that he was now born again.
He is fifty seven.
He has not been out of church since. Forty years, near enough, in three congregations, and he is a deacon in the current one and has been for eleven years and is good at it.
And he has never once felt like anybody's son.
That is the whole of the article and it has taken him forty years to say it in those words, and he has said it to nobody, and he is not going to.
He can tell you what he believes. It is orthodox and it is complete. He could take you through the doctrine of regeneration on a napkin and it would be right.
But underneath that, since he was seventeen, there has been a checking. It goes on at low level all the time and it has never once produced an answer. He watches himself for evidence. He compares how he feels in a service with how other men look. He has, three times in forty years, gone back and prayed the prayer again on his own, in a car, at about forty five years old on one occasion, and never told a soul about any of the three.
Because he was handed a verdict at seventeen by a man whose name he does not know, and he has spent forty years trying to verify it from the inside, and the inside will not produce the thing.
You know the checking. Yours may have started in a different tent. But you know what it is to be given a verdict about yourself and to have spent decades quietly auditing for evidence that never arrives in the form you are looking for.
Not yours to verify
Let me name the pit before we go to the verse, and let me be careful, because there is a bad version of this article that tells a man where he stands and I am not writing it. I do not know, and no page can, and any writer who hands a stranger a verdict has done the exact thing that was done to you in a tent.
The pit is not doubt about doctrine. Your doctrine is sound.
The pit is that you have been trying to verify, from inside yourself, an event that by its nature is not verified from inside. And when the checking produces nothing, which it always does, the only conclusion available to an honest man is that the thing did not happen, and you have been declining to draw that conclusion for forty years, which is exhausting, and which is why you are up reading this.
Here is the verse. It is Jesus, at night, to a serious religious man who wanted a mechanism.
That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.John 3:6
Read where the weight sits.
The whole of the doing is on one side. The flesh produces flesh; the Spirit produces spirit. There is nothing in that sentence about the person born, what they felt, what they can recall or what they can confirm.
And the next verses go further. Jesus says the wind blows where it wills and you hear the sound of it and cannot tell where it comes from or where it goes, and He says: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.
He said that to a man who wanted something he could inspect. It is nearly the last thing a man like Nicodemus, or like you, wants to hear, and Jesus said it anyway and did not soften it.
Take that on the step, and know it is not my consolation, it is what is written. The event you have been auditing was the Spirit's work, and it does not report to your inspection. John 3:6 puts all the doing on His side, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the birthing, and the wind was never going to explain itself to the person standing in it.
And here I draw the line this site always draws, in the same breath. God is neither male nor female. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and He is not a woman either; He is spirit. The birth language in John is one of the ways Scripture describes Him with a mother's picture beside a father's, and both are His own, and it does not make the Spirit a woman and it does not make God a goddess.
The checking cannot produce it and it never could.
You are not the one who verifies this, and you were never handed that job at seventeen or since. John 3:6 says that which is born of the Spirit is spirit and puts the whole of the doing on His side, and it is the Holy Spirit who does that work, which forty years of checking a night was never the instrument for.
That is the thing to actually put down, and it is not the same as putting down the question. The question is yours and it is a serious one and God is not offended by it and you may carry it for a while yet.
What you can put down is the method, because the method has had forty years and has produced nothing, and it was never going to, and Jesus said so to a man in the same position on the night He was asked.
So say the true thing about where the doing sits, out loud, and let that be the whole exercise.
This was His work and it is not mine to verify. That is John 3:6 read exactly as it stands, and it is the Holy Spirit who bears witness, in His own time and by His own means, which is a thing He does and not a thing a man produces by auditing himself in a car park at forty five.
I am not going to tell you what happened in that tent. It is not mine to tell and you would not trust me if I did, and you would be right.
What I will tell you is that a man who has been in three congregations for forty years, who is a deacon, who has prayed in a car three times because he could not let the question go, is not a man who has been indifferent to God. Whatever else is true, that is true, and it is not nothing, and it cost you something every one of those forty years.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud on the step. You are in Christ, and the authority to speak over a method forty years old is delegated to you in Him; it does not depend on your producing evidence, and you have not been able to. These stand on what is written in John and are carried by the Holy Spirit, not by anything you can confirm. What He shows you, and when, is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own timing.
- Forty years of checking, you were never how this is settled, and I say so in the name of Jesus. John 3:6 says that which is born of the Spirit is spirit, and every bit of the doing in that sentence is on His side.
- Verdict I was handed in a tent by a man whose name I never knew, you were not the mechanism either, and I stop trying to audit you. It is written that the wind blows where it wills and you cannot tell where it comes from, and His Spirit is the one who bears witness, in His own time.
- Lord, You are neither male nor female, and You give birth by Your Spirit. I read John 3:6 out loud and I say that this is Your work and not mine to verify, and I am not following the checking when it starts.
John 3:6
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