I Have Never Prayed Sitting Down

There is a chair in that room and it is a good one and it faces the window and he has never once used it for this.

Forty years. Standing, or on his knees when his knees allowed, which they have not for about six years. Standing now, mostly, by the desk, hands loose at his sides, in the last hour before the house wakes.

Nobody taught him this. That is what he would tell you if you asked, and it is true, and it is also not the whole of it. Nobody taught it to him, but somewhere around 1984, without any deliberation he can now locate, he began to feel that sitting to pray was a liberty.

Not a sin. He is far too careful a man to have believed that. A liberty. Something a person takes rather than something a person is granted.

He is sixty-three.

And he is not in doubt about God, and he is not confused about the doctrine. He settled the thing that needed settling as a young man, in a plain and unremarkable way, and it has never once come loose, and if you asked him he would tell you so precisely.

And he has never sat down to pray.

Because underneath forty years on his feet, unstated and never examined, there is a posture being maintained. The posture of a man appearing before somebody rather than being at home in a room with Him. And the strangest part, which he has noticed and never said, is that he can sit to read. He sits to study. He sits to write about God at length. It is only when he speaks to Him that his body puts him back on his feet.

Maybe you have a posture. It may not be standing. It may be a certain formality that arrives whenever it is prayer rather than anything else, or a voice you use, or a distance you keep in your own head. And you are not in doubt about being forgiven, and the whole shape of your morning is a man appearing.

Sit down in this chair. It faces the window, and that is deliberate.

Probation is a legal condition and it ended

Let me set it out as the legal matter it is, because that is the register it will actually land in.

Probation means the sentence stands, suspended, and conduct is being observed, and the observing is what holds the suspension in place. A man on probation is not free. He is out on terms, and one of the things he knows without being told is how to stand when he is being addressed.

That is what forty years of standing has been. Not reverence, or not only reverence. The bearing of a man who is appearing rather than at home.

And the terms ended. Not are ending. Ended, as a young man, plainly, and there has been nobody observing your conduct since.

He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is His steadfast love toward those who fear Him.Psalm 103:10-11

Read what the psalmist puts immediately after the not repaying, because he does not go to relief. He goes to the size of the love, and he measures it against the height of the sky, which is a way of saying that what replaced the transaction is not an absence but something enormous.

You were not merely let off, and Psalm 103 says He does not deal with us according to our sins and then measures what He does instead against the height of the heavens, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a measurement like that land in a room at six in the morning.

You are counted righteous without working for it, and Romans 4 says to the one who does not work but believes in Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness, and the Holy Spirit is the one who applies a word like counted to a man who has spent forty years on his feet.

Your reverence was never contemptible

Now something said carefully, because a paragraph like that could be turned into a way of making forty years of standing look like a mistake, and it is not a mistake.

Standing to pray is an entirely biblical posture and half the church has done it for two thousand years. There is nothing wrong with it. There are hours in that room that changed things, and there are people who were prayed for by a man on his feet before light, and none of that is canceled by anything in this article.

The reverence was good. Much of it will stay, and it should.

What is coming out is not the standing. It is what has been sitting underneath it, which is a conviction about entitlement.

You were never taking a liberty, and Hebrews 4 says let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can take a conviction out from under a good posture and leave the posture available. Nobody was watching how you stood. Nobody has been for forty years.

This is not a new rule

And one more, before the turn, because a man of your precision will already be constructing the replacement.

There is no new practice here. Nobody is asking you to sit from now on, or to alternate, or to institute a discipline of relaxed posture that you would then keep with total exactness. You would be very good at that within a month, and it would be the same appearance with the furniture rearranged.

One thing, once. That is all any of this is.

You are already at home in that room and there is nothing to institute, and it is written that we may draw near with confidence to the throne of grace, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a man from turning an invitation into a protocol.