The Limit That Was Never In The Document

The mothers of the church always end up in a ring.

Nobody organizes it. The chairs come out of the hall, somebody sets one down under the big tree, and within ten minutes there are nine of them in a circle with their fans going and their shoes off and a level of authority in that ring that the deacons have never once challenged.

Kendra came late and stood at the edge of it with her plate, the way you do when you are not sure you have been invited into a thing.

Mother Verlie noticed inside of four seconds. She has been noticing people at the edges of rings for sixty years. She said, "Come in here, baby, we cannot hear you all the way out there," and two of them shifted, and somebody's grandson dragged a chair over, and Kendra got folded into the middle of that circle whether she was ready or not.

They laughed at her about her shoes. They laughed at her about a boy from three years ago. She laughed until she had to hold the plate with both hands.

And then, in the way people ask the heaviest question of their lives lightly, so that they can pretend they were only making conversation if the answer is bad, she said:

"Mother. How many times does it say He forgives?"

Mother Verlie did not answer straight away. She folded her fan. Then she said, "Where do you think the number is, baby?"

And Kendra said, "Seventy times seven."

The ring went quiet. Nine women, a plate, the sound of somebody's radio two yards over.

Then Mother Verlie said: "Sugar. That is not a number. That is Him telling Peter to stop counting."

And Kendra put her plate down on the grass because her hands had started doing something she did not want anybody to see.

Because she had been counting. She had been counting since she was thirteen, when somebody said that number in a room and a careful literal-minded girl went home and understood herself to have been given an allowance. She had no idea what she was up to. She only knew the direction the number was going, and that it does not go back down.

And you have a number.

Maybe not that one. Maybe yours came from a house instead of a pulpit: three chances and then people stop looking at you. Maybe nobody ever said it out loud and you worked it out from how they treated you. But there is a figure somewhere in you, and you believe you are near it, and you have started rationing what you bring to God in case you need it later.

Come into the middle of the ring where we can hear you. We are going to go looking for that limit in the actual document.

Going to look for the ceiling

Let me be plain about the search itself, because I am not going to do the trick where a preacher tells you there are no conditions in this covenant at all. There are terms. This whole site exists because somebody has to say so honestly.

But a term and a ceiling are two different objects, and the number you carry is not a term. It has never been written into anything. Go and look for it and you will find something else standing where you expected the limit to be.

And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, Know the LORD, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.Jeremiah 31:34

That is God's own voice, in the first person, inside the terms of the new covenant. Read the last sentence again and look for the qualifier. There is no up to. There is no unless. There is no number of times attached anywhere to that clause.

So you are not standing near a ceiling, because Jeremiah 31:34 has God saying I will forgive and I will remember no more without a figure anywhere in the sentence, and the Holy Spirit is at this moment carrying that clause to the exact part of you that has been rationing.

And notice where it sits. It is not a footnote and it is not an appendix. It is inside the covenant's own terms, written in at the founding, before anybody had failed at anything. God did not draft an agreement and then get asked afterward what happens when people fall short. He wrote the provision for it into the document at the start, the way a builder puts a drain in the floor before anybody spills anything.

That is what this category is about. Mercy is not an exception granted to you when the real terms have been broken. Mercy is one of the terms.

What was standing where the limit should have been

When you go looking for the number and it is not there, something else is there, and He has a name and a job title.

My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.1 John 2:1

Look at how that sentence is built. The first half takes sin completely seriously: John writes so that they will not do it. Nothing casual, nothing shrugging. And then the second half, without a pause and without a lecture: but if anyone does.

That is the shape of the whole thing. Both halves in one breath, no contradiction between them.

So you have His seriousness and His provision in the same sentence, and you were never meant to choose between the two of them. The same Spirit who moved John to write so that you may not sin moved him to write but if anyone does, without a pause and without a lecture, and that is 1 John 2:1 in both of its halves. A God who takes your failure seriously is not a God who is counting down.

And the provision is not a policy. It is a person. The word behind advocate means the one called alongside, and the covenant does not hand you a procedure to follow when you fall, it names somebody who is already standing there.

You have an Advocate rather than an allowance, and 1 John 2:1 is where it is written down rather than a warm idea somebody had about God, and His Spirit is the One who makes that written name a present reality in the room where you are ashamed.

And your response is still real

Here is the ground, stated in the middle of the teaching rather than saved for the end. God's forgiving is His half, and it is settled, and it was settled with an oath before you drew breath. Your half is a response, and it is genuinely asked, and it is not the half holding this up.

The response is to come and say it. Plainly, once, without a presentation. That is asked of you and it matters, and I am not going to soften it into nothing to make you feel better.

But hear the difference between the response and the ceiling. Coming and saying it is not a payment against a total. It is what a person does inside a covenant where mercy is already written in. And nothing about your coming resets anything, extends anything, or renews anything, because none of it was running out.

So you are not renewing anything when you come, and there is nothing here that was running low. What you have is a clause already standing, written into Jeremiah 31:34 before anybody had failed at anything, and it is the Spirit, and not the frequency of your asking, who makes an old written mercy present in a room tonight.

He will again have compassion on us; he will tread our iniquities underfoot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea.Micah 7:19

Into the depths, where things do not float back up. That is not a probation and there is no period of review at the end of it.