She knows the doctrine perfectly and she teaches it better than most.
If you came to her carrying something you had done, she would take you to exactly the right places and she would not soften them and she would not hurry you, and you would leave having genuinely understood that it is dealt with.
She has done that for other people probably two hundred times.
She has never once had it happen to her.
Not in the sense of not believing it. She believes it, precisely, in the way you believe a load-bearing thing. Her own forgiveness is not in doubt in her mind for a second.
It has simply never had a moment attached to it.
It is a conclusion she reached, correctly, at nineteen, and has re-reached about a thousand times since, usually late at night, usually on her own, always by working through it again from the top. And every one of those thousand times was accurate and none of them left a mark.
She said something to a friend last year that she has thought about since. She said: I have been forgiven in the way you are informed about something.
So let me ask you.
Has your forgiveness ever had a moment attached to it?
The text bothers to record the touching
There is a scene in Isaiah where a man sees more than he can survive and says so.
He is not being modest. He says he is undone, and he names the specific thing: unclean lips, in a place where everything else is clean, and he expects that to be the end of the matter.
And what happens next is not a speech.
Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.Isaiah 6:6 and 7
Count the physical detail the text bothers to keep.
A coal. Tongs. A flight across a room. A hand. A touch. And then the words, and notice the words come second and refer backward: see, this has touched your lips.
Isaiah 6 records the carrying and the touching before it records the sentence, and the Spirit who filled that temple was in the tongs and the flight, so being forgiven has never had to arrive as information only.
Now let me be exact, because this is a place where people go wrong in both directions and I will not.
I am not saying an object forgave him. The altar and the coal came from God and the atonement is God's, and I am not going to rule on what any object anywhere does or does not do, in any direction, for anybody.
I am pointing at the reporting. Isaiah could have written and God forgave me. He wrote down the tongs.
And there is a second thing, which I think is the one you actually need.
The declaration is this has touched your lips, past tense, referring to a thing that had just happened in the room. Isaiah 6 gives the man a moment he could point at, and the Spirit was in that moment as much as in the theology of it, which means your thousand correct conclusions were never the same category of thing.
You have been informed. He was touched.
Here is where it turns, and it is not a doubt about anything you know.
Let it have a moment.
You do not need better doctrine. Yours is excellent and it has served two hundred people. You need the thing you have been giving away. Isaiah 6 has the coal carried across a room and laid on the man's mouth, and the Spirit was in that touch rather than in anything the man had said first.
And I want to be careful about what I am and am not sending you to do. I am not telling you that you must go to any particular person or place or that anything is required of you anywhere. Nothing here requires that of anybody, and a reader with nobody safe is not being left outside this article.
Isaiah 6 has a coal carried across a room and put against a man's mouth before the words are spoken, and the Spirit was in the whole physical business of it, so an event has never been a lesser form of assurance than a conclusion.
Say it out loud to one safe person, or say it out loud to the empty room. Either one puts it in the air, and the air is where it has never been.
Declare this over yourself
Say these where you can hear yourself. Know what holds them up. This authority is not yours by nature, it is Christ's, and in Christ it has been given to you, so you speak as one representing the King. And you speak under His will, never over it. However He answers, and in whatever way He comes, the outcome is His.
- Conclusion, you are true and correct and you are not a moment. Isaiah 6 records the tongs and the flight and the hand before it records one word of the sentence about guilt.
- Habit of re-reaching the same accurate finding alone at night, you have run a thousand times and left no mark, and in the name of Jesus I release you. The Spirit who filled that temple was in the carrying and the touching and not only in the doctrine.
- Lord, Isaiah 6 says see, this has touched your lips, in the past tense, about a thing that had just happened in the room. I am saying it out loud tonight to one person or to nobody, and I have been informed for twenty-two years and I am asking to be met.
Isaiah 6:7
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