There Is Nowhere For Me To Go Forward To

He gives the invitation about forty times a year, and he means it every time, and there is no version of it that is ever offered to him.

That is not self pity. It is a floor plan. When the music drops and he says come forward, the people who come forward walk toward where he is standing, and there is nobody standing further forward than him. The geography simply runs out.

And it is not only the geography. There are three hundred people in that building who would be at his door in an hour if he needed something, and every one of them relates to him as the man who prays rather than the man who is prayed for. He knows he could ask. He also knows exactly what asking would cost, and what it would start, and how it would travel.

So on Sunday he stands at the front and he asks God for things on behalf of other people, all morning, with real faith, and he cannot remember the last time he asked God for anything for himself in that room.

He has been doing this for fourteen years.

If you are the one who gives the invitation, come into the kitchen and get a mug. Nothing about that invitation, or about the people who answer it, is going to be run down here.

A floor plan quietly became a doctrine

Let us look at what actually happened over those fourteen years, because it happened by accident and it hardened like something deliberate.

There was no front for him, and so he stopped asking, and after enough years of not asking a man concludes something. Not out loud, and never in a sermon. What he concludes is that his own asking is a lower priority in the arrangement, and that the shepherd's needs are handled in some other way that he has never been shown.

That is a doctrine, and it is not in the book, and it got there because of where the chairs face.

You are not at the back of your own house. Nothing about a room with no front for you has ever changed the terms of your own access. I am not saying that because a pastor deserves a kind word. The written word says let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy (Hebrews 4:16), which names the actual front and puts it nowhere near a platform, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that hold in a man standing where the geography runs out.

Where the real front is

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it takes nothing off the invitation you give.

Read where that verse sends people, and read who it is written to.

Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.Hebrews 4:16

Let us. The writer puts himself inside it, which means the one doing the teaching is in the same queue as the ones being taught. There is no separate arrangement for the person at the front.

And boldly. Not carefully, not once the room is empty, not in a manner appropriate to his position. The word is chosen to remove exactly the hesitation a man in his position feels.

You come boldly on the same terms as everybody you pastor, and Scripture puts the teacher inside the let us rather than outside it. That is written into the sentence itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings it to a man fourteen years into holding a door open for everybody else.

Nothing here is against the invitation you give

Something has to be said plainly, or this becomes a page that quietly undercuts the very thing he does on Sundays.

That invitation is good. It has been the moment for a great many people in that room, and it should keep being given, and the fact that it points toward him is a feature of how a room works and not a flaw in his ministry. The people who walk to the front are not fooled and are not performing.

The relief is not that the front matters less than he has been telling people.

You can ask from your own chair, and asking there takes nothing off one invitation you have ever given. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon him (Psalm 145:18), where nearness is stated as His position rather than as a place a man has to reach, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not the direction the chairs face, who carries what is asked.

And if these fourteen years have cost more than the people in that kitchen know, if sleep has gone, if Sunday has started to frighten you, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people, and it is not a failure of ministry.