Reminding Him Every Time

There is a way she starts every prayer and she has never noticed she does it.

It is not in the words exactly. If you wrote her prayers down they would look like anybody's. It is in the first two or three seconds, before the words, where she puts the thing on the table. She does it the way you would slide a document across a desk to somebody before they say anything nice to you, so that whatever they say next is said with full knowledge and cannot be taken back on a technicality.

Lord, You know what I am. You know about that.

And then she prays.

Bethany is thirty-three. She has been doing this since she was twenty-six. And if you asked her why, she would say something about honesty, and she would half believe it, but the true reason is more specific and stranger and she has never said it out loud: she is afraid of receiving kindness from God under false pretenses. She has a horror of being comforted by somebody who has not been told. So she tells Him. Every single time. She leads with the charge, as a matter of integrity, and then she asks for what she needs, and the whole thing takes four seconds longer than it needs to and costs her something she cannot name.

The odd thing, and she has noticed this and it has never helped, is that God does not seem to receive it as new information.

There is a room like that side room here, and there is a woman in it who has been prosecuting her own case in every conversation she has with God for seven years, and I want to read her something that God says in the first person about His own memory.

Because you do this too. Maybe not in a side room and maybe not for seven years. But you bring it up first, before He can be kind to you, so that the kindness is not obtained under false pretenses. That is what this is for.

Read who He says He is doing it for

I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake, and will not remember thy sins.Isaiah 43:25

Take the sentence in three pieces, because each one takes something off her.

I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions. The doubled pronoun is emphasis and it is God insisting on being the subject of the sentence. This is His action, done by Him, and the verb is blotteth out, which in that world meant a scribe wiping the ink off the surface of the document so that the writing was no longer there to be read.

For mine own sake. Now that is a strange phrase and it is the one that will free her, if she lets it. He is not blotting it out because somebody made a good case for her. He is not doing it because she has been sufficiently honest about it in the opening seconds of her prayers. He is doing it for His own sake, which puts the motive entirely inside Himself, where her disclosures cannot improve or damage it.

And will not remember thy sins. Not cannot; will not. It is a decision, taken by God, about what He will do with a document He has already wiped.

You are dealing with a God who has decided what He will not remember, and it is already decided, and the deciding was done for His own sake and not on the strength of your honesty. I am not comforting a woman in a side room. It is written in Isaiah 43:25, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries God's own first-person statement about His memory into a room where a woman is still leading with the charge.

What she is actually protecting

Now here is the tender part, and it took me a long time to see it in people like her.

She is not being morbid and she is not fishing for reassurance. She is protecting God. In some strange, upside down, entirely sincere way, she is making sure that God is not deceived into being good to her, because being good to her under a misapprehension would be beneath Him.

It is honorable. It is also a lot of work, and it rests on a picture of God as somebody who could be caught out, and He cannot be.

You are speaking to one who knows all of it, and it is already fully known, and there is no version of you that could be presented to Him as news. Scripture says all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do (Hebrews 4:13), and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman stop performing full disclosure to somebody who was present.

The one He is not asking for

And here is what she has never been given: a picture of what He actually wants at the start of a prayer.

Not the document. He wiped the document. What He wants is her.

There is a difference between confession, which is real and which Scripture asks for, and re-entering a charge that has been dismissed, which Scripture never asks for anywhere. Confession is bringing something to Him once and leaving it there. What she is doing is a recital, performed at the top of every conversation, of a thing that was dealt with in year one.

You are welcome at the start of a prayer without any preamble, and the welcome is already unconditional, and it was not obtained under any pretense. It is written that we come boldly unto the throne of grace (Hebrews 4:16), and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the word boldly and puts it in the mouth of a woman who has been apologizing for four seconds before every sentence for seven years.