Praying Over the Woman in Row Four

It happens at the end, when the music is still going and most people have started for the doors.

She was not looking for it. She was gathering her bag. And then somebody said her name and pointed, the way people do, with their chin, at a woman sitting in the fourth row who had not stood up.

Everybody knows. The husband died on the eighteenth. Forty one years old. It happened at work and there was nothing anybody could have done and the whole church has been sick about it for eleven days.

So she went over. Of course she went over. And she sat down one seat away and did not say anything for a while, and then the woman turned her face and looked at her, and she put her hand out and laid it on that woman's shoulder and prayed.

And the words came. They always come. She heard herself say: the Lord is near to you, He is not far off, He is holding you right now even when you cannot feel one thing.

Her own husband died in April.

She got out to her car afterward and sat in it and put both hands on the wheel and said, out loud, to nobody: I do not believe a word of that for myself.

That is the thing eating her. Not that the prayer was false. She knows it is true. She has known it was true since she was nineteen years old. She can feel it being true when it goes out of her mouth over somebody else's shoulder.

She just cannot get it to come the other way. It goes out and it never comes back in. And now she is a woman who prays over widows on a Sunday and drives home to a house where the same sentence will not land, and there is a word for that, and the word has been sitting in her chest since April.

Hypocrite.

If anybody has sat in a parked car with both hands on a wheel like that, stay with me. There is a sentence in the seventh chapter of Second Corinthians that shows exactly how God does this, and it is not what she has been assuming.

God comforted Paul by sending somebody through a door

Here is the verse, and it is one of the plainest descriptions in the New Testament of the mechanism.

Nevertheless God, that comforteth those that are cast down, comforted us by the coming of Titus.2 Corinthians 7:6

God comforteth those that are cast down. That is who He is and that is what He does. And then Paul tells us how it happened in his own case, and it is not a feeling that descended in a room.

It was Titus. A man arriving. A door opening in Macedonia and somebody Paul loved walking through it.

Read the sentence again and notice it does not say Titus comforted us. It says God comforted us by the coming of Titus. The comfort was God's. The door was Titus.

So consider what that makes a hand on a shoulder in row four. That is not a woman performing a faith she cannot muster. That is a door, and God is the one coming through it, and the fact that the door cannot feel what passes through it has never once been the point.

You are the coming of Titus in that fourth row, and you were that in April for every person who came through your own door. 2 Corinthians 7:6 is the written word saying God comforts by the coming of a person, and the Spirit who breathed that line was on your hand while it was on her shoulder.

And there is a second thing in the verse. Look at who Paul says God comforts: those that are cast down. Not those who have recovered their footing. Not those who can testify well. Cast down, which in that chapter means Paul had no rest in his flesh and was troubled on every side, with fightings without and fears within.

That is the man God is comforting, in that condition, at that moment.

You are exactly the person that verse describes, and you were exactly that on every Sunday since April when you got to your car and could not start it. 2 Corinthians 7:5 says without were fightings, within were fears, and the Holy Spirit is not comforting some other category of person than the one sitting in a parked car.

Hypocrite is the wrong word and it is doing damage

Now let me take that word out of her chest, because it has been in there since April and it does not belong to her.

A hypocrite in the Gospels is a person who performs a righteousness he does not possess in order to be seen by other people. That is the whole definition. It is about a false front put on for an audience.

What she did in row four was say something true, that she believes, that she has staked her whole life on, to a woman who needed to hear it.

The fact that it will not land in her own chest tonight is not a lie. It is a wound.

There is a great difference between a woman saying what she does not believe and a woman saying what she believes and cannot currently feel. The first is deceit. The second is most of the psalms.

David tells his own soul to hope in God in the forty second psalm, and in the same psalm his tears have been his meat day and night and he asks God twice why He has forgotten him. That is one man, in one poem, doing both things at once. And that psalm is in the book, and God put it there, and nobody has ever called David a hypocrite for it.

You are not a fraud in that sanctuary, and you were not one on any Sunday since April when the words went out and did not come back. Psalm 42:5 has a man commanding his own soul to hope while his tears are still his meat day and night, and the Holy Spirit did not remove that psalm from the book for inconsistency.

The going out and the coming in are two different pipes

Now let me say a thing about how this actually works, because I think she has assumed a rule that God never made.

She has assumed that comfort has to be received before it can be given. That there is an order to it. Fill first, pour second.

There is no such rule anywhere in Scripture.

What there is instead is 2 Corinthians 1:4, which says the comfort we hand on is the comfort we ourselves are being comforted with, present tense, ongoing, still arriving. It is not a reservoir. It is a pipe with water moving in it, and a pipe does not get to taste anything.

And the practical shape of that is this. She may go on praying true things over women in row four for a long time before one of those sentences ever lands in her own chest. That is not a failure of the arrangement. That is the arrangement.

And when it does come, it will very likely not come from her own mouth. It will come the way it came to Paul. Somebody will walk through a door.

You have been carrying live water through a pipe that cannot taste it, and you were carrying it every week since April whether or not one drop registered. 2 Corinthians 1:4 puts the receiving and the handing on in the same present tense, and the Holy Spirit does not require a woman to feel wet before He will use her.