Twenty Minutes And No Opinion

Twenty to six in the afternoon and the light on the driveway has gone that low gold that makes even gravel look like it was arranged by somebody.

Gordon is standing at the back of his car with the trunk open, not doing anything in particular. He has been out here eleven minutes. The trunk has been open for nine of them.

Inside on the counter his phone is face down beside a message he has now read four times. It is from Ellen at the church, and it says that Pete is walking again on Tuesdays, four miles each way, and does anybody happen to go out that direction.

Gordon goes out that direction. Gordon goes out that direction every Tuesday at six, and has for eleven years, and everybody who would think to ask knows it.

And here is the other thing that is true, and it is not a small thing, and nobody is going to pretend it away.

Gordon could give you the list.

He has given it, at that very counter, more than once, item by item, and there is not an unfair item on it. He was there for all of it. He said things at the time that turned out to be exactly right and were not listened to. He watched the whole business the way a man watches a car roll down a hill with the brake off, calling out, waving his arms, and then just standing there watching it go.

Twenty minutes. That is what this costs. Twenty out and twenty back, in a car that runs fine, on a road he is driving anyway at that hour.

And he is standing at an open trunk in the gold light doing arithmetic that has nothing whatever to do with time.

Because the sentence in his chest is not I do not have twenty minutes. The sentence in his chest is: he earned every bit of this.

And that sentence is not a lie. That is the entire trouble with it.

Gordon shuts the trunk. He goes in. He leaves at six, takes the road he always takes, does not slow down at the top of the hill, and has an argument the whole way out with somebody who is not in the car with him.

You know that driveway. You know that argument. There is a person somewhere whose trouble you can account for down to the last decision, and everything reasonable in you says the account is correct, and you have been standing there holding something small that they need, doing sums that were never about the small thing at all.

Nobody Is Asking You To Tear Up The List

I want to say the thing you are braced for, so that you can stop bracing.

Nothing here is going to argue that you have him wrong. I do not know your situation and I am not going to stand at a distance and tell you the man is innocent. You were there. I was not. That is not my business and it is not the business of this message.

Nothing here is going to confirm it either, because that is not my business in the other direction, and because you would not believe a stranger who did.

The list stays where it is. Nobody is asking you to burn it, revise it, or announce in front of anybody that you have changed your mind.

You are being asked for twenty minutes, and not for a single word about your opinion. Matthew 5:45 says God makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and the unjust, and notice that the sun is not a statement about anybody's record; the Spirit who prompts a man to do a small thing on a Tuesday is not asking him to file a revised finding first.

That is the hinge of the whole message and I want to drive it in. Mercy is not a verdict. It never was. Mercy is a thing done with hands toward a need, and the question of how the need got there is a separate question in a separate room, and the two do not have to be answered in the same hour.

Which means the argument you have been having in the car is not the argument you thought it was. You have been trying to decide whether he deserves it, because you assumed that was the gate. It is not the gate. It was never the gate.

You have an accurate list and a pair of merciful hands, and those two things are not in conflict. No line of mine could make that true; it is written in James 2:13 that mercy triumphs over judgment, and triumphs is a word about two real things in the same field rather than one of them being deleted, and the same Spirit who inspired it is the one who moves a man's hands while his opinion is still sitting exactly where it was.

The Part You Do Not Like To Look At

Now the harder half, and I am going to be gentle with it because it is tender ground.

There is one account you have never audited, and it is your own.

He saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit.Titus 3:5

Read what that verse takes off the table. Not most of it. All of it. Not because of works done by us in righteousness, which is an unusually blunt way of saying that the merit column was empty and God did not consult it.

You were received on a day when nothing in you argued your case. That is Titus 3:5 speaking and not a preacher being humble at you, and the same Spirit named in that verse, the one who did the renewing, is the one at work in you right now while you stand at an open trunk.

And I want to be careful here, because there is a cheap version of this move and it does harm. The cheap version says: you are just as bad as he is, so who are you to judge. That is not what the verse says and it is not what I am saying. Your list may be entirely accurate. The point is not that your judgment is wrong. The point is that mercy has never once run on the merit column, not when it came to you, and it does not start running on it now that you are the one holding it.

You are standing on ground you did not earn, holding something small you could hand across. No argument gets a man there; His word says that while we were still weak, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly, and the Spirit who applied that to you when your own column was empty is not asking you to fill in somebody else's before you move.

And one more thing, because it is what actually stops men like Gordon.

You are afraid that giving means conceding. That if you drive out there, you have said, in effect, that you were wrong the whole time, that the things you said at the counter were unkind, that the list was never fair.

You have been carrying a fear with no verse under it anywhere. Nothing in the written word ties a merciful act to a retraction; Micah 6:8 asks for justice and mercy and a humble walk in the same breath and the same man, three things at once and not one of them canceling another, and the Holy Spirit has been holding all three together in people for a very long time.