The Door He Was Sure Would Be Locked

The side door is the one on the alley, down three steps, under a light with a wire cage over it.

He passes it four nights a week walking back from the bus stop, and on Wednesdays there is singing coming through it. Not good singing. Fifteen or twenty people and somebody on a piano who is doing their honest best, and the sound comes out through the gap at the bottom of the door and up the three steps and hangs in the cold about the height of a man's chest.

He slows down. He has never once decided to slow down. It just happens at that door, every Wednesday, for about the length of a held breath, and then he keeps walking, and by the corner he has his keys out.

He has never tried the handle.

That is the thing about him you have to get if you are going to understand him at all. It is not that he tried and it was locked. It is not that he went in once and somebody was cold to him. He has never touched the door. He does not need to, because he already knows. He worked it out a long time ago, and the working out went like this: places like that are for people who are already inside, and there is a version of a man they are willing to take, and he knows precisely what he is and it is not that version.

He is fifty one. He was in some trouble in his twenties that a couple of people never got over and neither did he. He has a daughter he speaks to twice a year and it is his own fault and he does not argue about it. He has a small apartment, a clean record for twenty six years, and a habit of leaving a room before anybody has to decide about him.

So he does not try doors. Not that one and not the ones like it. He has removed himself from every list before anybody could take him off it, and he is not bitter about it, and I want you to hear that clearly, because he is not standing in that alley shaking his fist at anybody. He is standing in that alley being polite. He has decided in advance that he is the exception, and it has saved him from an enormous amount of being told so.

The trouble with deciding in advance is that you never find out. You get to keep the verdict, and the verdict is comfortable in the way an old coat is comfortable, and it is also the only thing between you and a room with a piano in it. He has been carrying his own no for thirty years so that nobody else would have to say it, and he has never once heard anybody actually say it, because he never gave anybody the chance and he never gave God the chance either.

If you have been carrying somebody else's no in your own mouth, hear me. I am not going to tell you to go and try the handle. That is not what this is about and it may not even be the right building. You are already on the list, and you were put on it before you started taking yourself off things. That is not sentiment. John 6:37 says it in a flat sentence with no exception in it, and the Spirit walked you into this paragraph tonight.

The Sentence With No Exception In It

Jesus is in the middle of the hardest crowd He ever taught, and He says two things back to back, and the second one is the plainest sentence in the New Testament.

All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.John 6:37

Take the second half first, because that is the one with your name on it.

In no wise. That is the King James doing its best with a Greek construction that piles two negatives on top of each other, which was how that language shouted. It is not a polite reassurance. It is the strongest way a man could say never in that tongue. Not under any circumstance. Not for any reason. Not in any case anybody could construct.

And notice what is not there. There is no list of who this applies to. There is no clause reading except for. There is no bracket with a condition in it. He had every opportunity to add one, in front of a crowd that was already arguing with Him, and He did not, and He never did, and it is the same in every account of Him.

The man in the alley has spent thirty years writing the exception clause himself, out of his own head, in a sentence that never had one.

You have a promise with no exception clause in it, and nobody has the authority to write one in. Christ said it out loud and it stands written at John 6:37, and His Spirit is not softening it for you or for anybody else.

He Was Never Waiting Behind It

Now the first half, because this is where the whole thing turns over.

All that the Father giveth me shall come to me. Look at who does what in that sentence. The Father gives. The coming follows the giving. The initiative is not on the man on the steps. It was never on the man on the steps.

Which means the whole picture you have been running is upside down. You have imagined a door with somebody behind it deciding, and you standing outside auditioning, and the outcome hinging on whether you are the kind of thing they let in. That is not the arrangement. The arrangement is that the Father hands people over to the Son, and the Son loses none of them, and you have been standing in an alley conducting a hearing that is not happening.

Nothing about you got you on that list. That is the part I want to hand you plainly, because you are a man who will start calculating the second I leave a gap. It is not because of the twenty six clean years and it is not in spite of what happened in your twenties. He said it first, out of Himself, before you were old enough to have a record either way. The claim was made from His side and it was made about you, and nothing in your file is what put it there or what could take it out.

This is yours tonight, and the thirty years of deciding in advance did not change one letter of it. His word left no exception in John 6:37, and the Spirit has been leaning on that sentence in you since the bus stop.