She has heard about forty of them over the years and she can tell you which is her favorite.
The man who was in a car park. The woman at a kitchen sink in 1994 who could give you the month, the weather and what was on the radio. The one at a festival in a tent when the rain came through.
They are good stories and she loves hearing them and she has never once been jealous in the ordinary sense.
She has nothing.
She was in it before she can remember. There was a house where God was talked about the way weather is talked about, and there was a church that was neither remarkable nor cold, and there was no crisis, no rebellion, no coming back, and no evening when anything happened that she could put a pin in.
She is thirty six. She has loved Jesus for as long as she has had words.
And here is the thing she has never said out loud, and which arrived properly last November in a room where people were sharing, and she had nothing to share and said something vague about growing up in it, and a woman said, kindly, "So there wasn't really a moment then."
She said no, there wasn't really.
And in the car she thought: I do not have the thing. Everybody else has the thing and I do not have it, and if it came to it, if somebody really pressed me, I could not prove any of this happened.
She would like to be clear that she is not tormented. Her faith is steady. She prays and it is real and she would tell you God has been good to her.
There is just a small permanent absence where other people have a story, and she has quietly decided that the absence counts against her.
You know the absence. Yours may be a different missing item. But you know what it is to be unable to produce the thing everybody else produces, and to have concluded, without ever announcing it, that the not producing is evidence.
Nobody births themselves
Let me name the pit before we go to the verse, because if this becomes an argument about whether testimonies matter it will miss what is actually happening.
You are not missing anything the verse asks for, and you were never asked for a date. John 3:6 names no room and no hour and puts the doing wholly on the Spirit, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the birthing.
The testimonies matter. Those forty stories are true and they are worth telling and the woman at the sink in 1994 should go on telling hers.
The pit is that you have been treating a memory as the evidence for a birth, and a memory is not what makes a birth real, and the whole category is wrong in a way nobody has ever corrected because nobody has ever known you were doing it.
Here is the sentence, and it is Jesus talking to a serious religious man at night.
That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.John 3:6
Read the verb.
Born. He chose that word, and He stayed with it through the whole conversation even when Nicodemus objected to it and tried to make it absurd, and He did not swap it for a word about deciding or a word about an experience.
And a birth has one feature above all others, which is that the one being born does not perform it.
You cannot birth yourself. Nobody in the history of the world has done it. A person is not present at their own birth as an agent; they are present as the thing that is being brought forth, and every single human being on this earth is entirely dependent on somebody else's account for the details of their own arrival.
Nobody can point to the day they were born. Everybody has to be told.
Take that in the car, and know it is not my reassurance, it is what the word means. You are looking for evidence of a thing that by its nature you did not do. John 3:6 uses a birth word deliberately, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the birthing, which is exactly why the absence of a memory is not the absence of an event.
Now, a boundary, because this site does not hand out verdicts. I am not going to tell you where you stand, and no article should, and any writer who pronounces on a stranger's standing from a page has overreached badly. That is between you and God and He is not shy about it.
What I will say is what the verse says: birth is His work and not yours, and the thing you cannot produce was never the thing that produces it.
You are not short of anything that verse asks for, and you were never asked for a date. John 3:6 names no room and no hour and puts the doing wholly on the Spirit, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the birthing, which is why a missing date has never been evidence of anything.
And here I draw the line this site always draws, in the same breath, because the whole ground depends on it. 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, which is exactly what John 3:6 is saying about Him in the same sentence. Scripture describes Him with a father's traits and a mother's both, and the birth language here is one of the ways it does that, and it does not make the Spirit a woman and it does not make God a goddess.
The woman with the storm was not born any harder than you.
You are not short of anything the verse asks for, and you were never required to produce a date. John 3:6 mentions no room, no hour and no prayer, and puts the doing entirely on the Spirit, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the birthing, which is why a missing date has never been evidence of anything.
That is the whole thing and it is very simple once the category is right.
You have been in a room where forty people described their arrival and you had nothing to describe, and you concluded that the describing was the arriving, and it never has been for anybody.
Every one of those forty is dependent on the same thing you are, which is what God has done and not what they can recount. The car park is a memory. The sink in 1994 is a memory. Memories are wonderful and they are not the mechanism.
You did not do this, and the thing you cannot produce was never the proof of it. That is John 3:6 read on its own terms, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the birthing, and He does not require the person being born to have been taking notes.
And the woman in November who said, so there wasn't really a moment then. She was not accusing you. She was making conversation with somebody whose story did not fit the shape of the evening, and she probably has not thought about it since, and you have thought about it for nine months.
Let her have said an ordinary thing. And let the answer, next time, be the true one: no, there was not a moment, in the same way that nobody remembers being born.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, sitting. You are in Christ, and the authority to speak over a conclusion you have carried without announcing it is delegated to you in Him; it does not depend on your producing a memory, and you will not. These stand on what is written in John and are carried by the Holy Spirit, not by anything you can recount. What He gives you to know, and when, is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own timing.
- Date I cannot produce, you were never the evidence, and I say so in the name of Jesus. John 3:6 says that which is born of the Spirit is spirit, and a birth is a thing done to a person and not by them.
- Conclusion I came to in the car in November, that not having the thing counts against me, you have no ground in my life. It is written that nobody is present at their own birth as the one performing it, and His Spirit is the one who does the birthing, which never required me to have been taking notes.
- Lord, You are neither male nor female, and You are the one who gives birth by Your Spirit. I read John 3:6 out loud and I say that nobody births themselves, and I am not going looking for a memory afterward.
John 3:6
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
