I Stay in the Pew

The row goes up in order and he is third from the aisle, and for seven years he has let it go past him.

He does it well. He has had a lot of practice. He shifts his knees to the side so the woman beside him can get out easily, and he looks down at his hands with an expression that reads as prayerful, and the whole row files past him and comes back, and he shifts his knees again, and nobody has ever said a word.

His wife knows. She has never asked. Once, in the second year, she put her hand on his back on the way past and left it there for a second, and that is the only conversation they have ever had about it.

He is fifty-eight. He has been in that church since he was a boy. He put the roof on the hall with two other men in 1994.

And here is what matters: he believes he is forgiven. This is not a man in doubt. He took a thing to God years ago, seriously, kneeling in an empty church on a weekday, and something settled in him that day and has never come unsettled. If you sat with him he would tell you the doctrine plainly and he would be right.

He simply cannot make his legs stand up when the row moves.

He has never worked out how to say that to anybody, because the two halves of it sound like they cannot both be true, and a man does not want to hand somebody a sentence that makes him sound as though he does not know his own mind.

So somewhere in seven years he stopped calling it a difficulty and started calling it a signal. If he were welcome he would be able to go. The legs know something the doctrine does not.

Maybe you have a row that goes past you. It might not be communion. It might be a hand you do not put up, or a role you do not say yes to, or a seat at a table you keep declining. Your body will not carry you somewhere you believe you are allowed to be, and after years you upgraded that from a difficulty to a verdict.

Sit down here with the coffee. Nothing here is going to tell you the legs are nothing.

Legs do not decide who is welcome

Here is the distinction, and everything else in this rests on it.

There is what is legally true about a man and there is what his body will do. Two registers. They are perfectly capable of disagreeing for seven years without either one changing the other. The invitation was issued in a court and sealed at a table. The refusal happens in a pair of legs. Legs have never once decided who is welcome anywhere.

This is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.Matthew 26:28

Look at who is at the table when He says it. Judas is in that room. Peter, who is going to deny Him three times before morning, takes the cup from His hand. Every man at that table is about to fail Him in some direction, and He knows it in detail, and He passes it round anyway, and He says the words for the forgiveness of sins over people who have not yet even done the thing they will need forgiving for.

You are being handed something that was poured out for many and not for the qualified, and Matthew 26 is where that is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a table an invitation rather than an examination.

And notice what none of it says. It does not say your legs will cooperate. Scripture is entirely clear about who the table is for and entirely silent about what a man's body does on the way to it. You have been holding God to a promise nobody wrote, and what He did write is about the blood and about the many, and His Spirit is the one who keeps a man reading the actual sentence.

Seven years is a groove, not a signal

Now the reasoning, because a man who put a roof on a building will do better with a mechanism than with reassurance.

The argument goes: if I were welcome, I would be able to go. That sounds like sense and it is not, and here is why. A body does not act on legal facts. A body acts on what it has practiced. Seven years of the same movement, the same music, the same row moving in the same direction at the same point in a service, and one decision made once, in the first year, for a reason that was real at the time. Everything after that has been rehearsal.

Three hundred and fifty Sundays of staying seated is not a signal being sent. It is a groove being followed, and grooves get deeper by use and not by truth.

And there is a plain practical thing under this too. A refusal that physical and that reliable is worth mentioning to a doctor or a counselor, and doing that is not a step down from faith. A body affects a soul and always has, and the man who checks is the one being sensible.

You are not being turned away in the third pew, and Isaiah 55 says come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters, and it is His Spirit who issues that and not your knees.

I am not going to promise your legs will move

The honest part now, and I will not do to you what somebody probably did once meaning it kindly.

I am not telling you that you will be up and walking by Advent. I do not know that. For some men it comes loose within a few months of getting the reading straight. For others it takes years and comes in stages, and the first stage is often nothing anybody could see from outside. There is no timetable in Scripture and I am not inventing one so this article finishes neatly.

What I will tell you is that the refusal was never what made the invitation real, so it has never once been able to cancel it. You were welcomed by a finished act and not by a cooperative body, and Hebrews 10 says by one offering He has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified, and the Spirit is what holds that up on a Sunday when your legs will not.

And here is what you are allowed to do, and I do not think anybody has offered it to a man in the third pew. You are allowed to say the true thing out loud while you are still sitting down. That is not pretending. Pretending would be telling your wife it is nothing. Saying the verdict while your knees are turned to the side is the opposite of pretending: it is telling the truth about the table and the truth about the pew at the same time.