Seven Times Down

Most men counting their falls stop counting somewhere around the point where they decide they are hopeless. The proverb has a different arithmetic. It says that though a righteous man falls seven times, he rises again, and that the wicked stumble in calamity. Notice what makes a man righteous here. It is not that he never goes down. It is that he keeps getting back up, and the getting up is treated as the mark of the righteous rather than an exception to it.

That should slow you down if you have been reading your relapses as evidence that you were never serious about God to begin with. The verse assumes a righteous man will hit the floor, and more than once, and it still calls him righteous while he is down there. The falling was never the thing that disqualified you.

What God is watching for is whether you will rise, and he is not standing over you tapping his foot while you do it. He is the one who reaches down. If you are on the ground this morning, you are not outside the category of men God calls his own. You are exactly the man this proverb was written to keep from quitting. Get up slowly if you have to. Just get up.

Father, I have lost count of my falls. Teach me to count the times you have lifted me instead, and give me the strength to rise once more.