He Is Faithful, Not Reluctant

It is still alight in you. Before anything else.

You would not be reading this otherwise. A woman who has finished with God does not go looking, at whatever hour this is, for something about being forgiven.

She is fifty-four and she has a picture of God's face that she has never described to anybody, because as soon as you say it out loud it sounds like something you would be corrected for.

In the picture, He does forgive her. That is not the problem. She is not one of the ones who doubts that.

He forgives her the way a tired parent forgives a child who has come to them for the fourth time that day about the same thing. There is a small pause first. Something passes over the face. And then, yes, of course, come here. And the thing is genuinely given and it is genuinely given with a sigh.

So she has become a particular kind of person before God. Brief. Apologetic about being there at all. She thanks Him a great deal for putting up with her, which she thinks is humility and which is really a way of getting in ahead of the sigh.

And she has never brought anything to Him twice. Not because she was told not to. Because in the picture she is watching the face, and she has decided she will not be the one who makes it do that again.

The two words John uses

John writes the sentence everybody knows, and the two words in the middle of it are the ones nobody stops on.

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.1 John 1:9

Faithful and just.

Those are not warm words. That is deliberate. John does not say kind enough or willing or merciful, if you catch Him right. He picks two words about obligation and consistency.

Faithful means He is keeping something. There is a commitment in place, made by Him, and He is being true to it.

Just means the matter has already been legally settled. He is not deciding whether to forgive. That was decided at the cross, and forgiving you is Him doing what is right by what His Son already did.

There is no room in either word for a sigh. A sigh belongs to somebody making a fresh decision each time, at cost, from a supply that is running down. That is not the arrangement John describes.

You are forgiven by a God who is keeping faith with Himself when He does it. That is not me putting a bright reading on a familiar verse; 1 John 1:9 chooses faithful and just rather than any word about mood, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes two legal words and lays them over a picture of a face a woman has carried for years.

Whose face it actually is

Now let me ask the question I think will do the work, and I want you to sit with it rather than answer it fast.

Whose face is it?

Because somebody's face did that. That expression, the pause and the thing passing over it and then the yes of course, is not an abstraction. It is a memory. You have seen it. And at some point you put it on God, the way we all put the faces we know onto the One we cannot see.

It is not His. It never was. But it is so familiar that it has never once occurred to you to question it, because it does not arrive as a thought; it arrives as a picture, and pictures do not get examined the way thoughts do.

You have been reading a borrowed face and calling it God's. The written word gives His forgiving as an act of faithfulness and justice rather than of patience, and the Holy Spirit has never once been described anywhere as putting up with anybody.

And let me take one more thing off you, because it is doing quiet damage. The habit of never bringing a thing twice. You think that is consideration. What it has actually done is make you handle the recurring things alone, which are precisely the things a person cannot handle alone, and that is why the same few matters have been sitting in you for years.

You are not rationed, and no supply has ever been running down. Scripture says His compassions fail not, without a clause about frequency, and the Holy Spirit has been present every time a woman decided not to come back about the same thing.