Nothing Left to Prove Before Breakfast

There are about seven seconds, first thing, before it starts.

Seven seconds of nothing at all. A ceiling. Light on it, or no light yet. A body that is only a body, warm, unaccounted for, not yet anybody's responsibility.

And then the ledger opens.

Nobody keeps a real one. There is no notebook. But she has been keeping this one since she was maybe eleven and it is beautifully organized by now, and it opens itself, and it always opens to the same page. On the left, everything owed. The message she has not answered since Tuesday. The parent she should call more. The friend whose bad month she has been meaning to properly ask about. The version of herself she was clearly supposed to have become by this age and has not become. On the right, everything paid. Yesterday's work, which was solid, which is not enough, which is never quite enough to close the gap, because while she is settling one line on the left the left is quietly adding two more.

And here is what people get wrong about her. She is not lazy. She is one of the hardest working people you will ever meet, and none of the working touches it, not once, not ever, because the debt is not actually made of tasks. She knows this. She could explain it to you clearly over coffee. She could tell you outright that she is trying to pay down something that no amount of tasks was ever designed to pay, and knowing that has changed absolutely nothing, which is its own particular humiliation.

She prays. She loves God, and she would say so and mean it. But she comes to Him with the ledger open, and she reads Him the left column first, because it would feel dishonest to lead with anything else.

And you wake up behind. In that exact order. The ceiling, the seven seconds, the ledger. Already in arrears before your feet touch the floor, before the kettle, before breakfast, before you have had the opportunity to do one single thing wrong today.

Stay with me. I want to show you something that closed an account.

Somebody Already Signed the Bottom of the Page

I am not going to argue you out of this. I have watched people try to argue someone out of this and it does not work, because you are not holding a bad idea. You are holding a whole way of standing up in the morning. Which is why I am not going to hand you a better argument. Galatians 2:20 is not an argument, it is a death certificate with your account number on it, and it is the Spirit who takes it down past the arguing and into the seven seconds themselves.

So let me do something else instead. Let me describe you, and you can tell me whether I have been reading your mail.

You reread messages after you have sent them. You apologize for things that are weather. When somebody praises your work you hear the sentence, and you file it under "was kind of them," and it never reaches the place the criticism goes, which has excellent filing. Rest makes you uneasy. Not tired-uneasy, guilty-uneasy, because rest is what people do when the account is settled and yours is not. You are gracious to everybody, genuinely gracious, and would never speak to another human being the way you narrate your own morning. And there is a person you were supposed to be by now, and you can picture her, and she is doing fine, and every time you get near her she moves.

If that is close, then I am not talking to a category of person. I am talking to you, and you have been carrying that alone, and I would like it very much if you would sit down. Not unnoticed, though. His Spirit has been in those seven seconds every morning you have ever had them, and what Galatians 2 says was written for a person and not for a category.

Now. Here is a man who had the worst left column in the entire New Testament.

Paul had held the coats of the men who stoned Stephen to death. He had gone house to house and dragged believers out of them. He had a record he could not talk himself out of and did not try to, and he named himself the chief of sinners in writing, in a letter he knew would be read out loud in rooms full of people. There was no version of Paul's ledger that balanced. Not with effort, not with religion, not with the extremely impressive religious career he had built before any of this.

And this is the sentence he writes about how he now gets out of bed.

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.Galatians 2:20

Read the first clause slowly, because it is doing something legal, not only something poetic.

The one who owed it has already been executed. That is the claim. Not that the debt was reduced, not that it was rescheduled into affordable installments, not that God looked at the total and decided to be lenient this quarter. The account holder died. And you cannot be behind on an account that belongs to somebody who is no longer alive to hold it.

Elsewhere Paul reaches for an even more specific picture. He speaks of the handwriting that stood against us, and the word he uses is the ordinary word for a note of debt written out in a person's own hand. Your own writing. Your own list. The left column, in your handwriting, because you did write it, nobody made you. And Paul says it was taken out of the way and nailed to the cross.

Not erased quietly so you can pretend it never existed. Nailed up in public, where everyone could see exactly what was owed, and settled where everyone could see it settled.

Now the last clause of that verse, which almost nobody quotes, and which I think is the whole reason it was written.

Who loved me, and gave himself for me.

Singular. The man with the largest debt in the room reaches for the smallest possible word. Not "loved us." Me. Paul does not stand at the back of the crowd and take a proportional share of the atonement. He walks straight to the front and says that if it had been only him, it would still have happened, and he says it without one syllable of apology.

That is what I want for you, and I do not want it eventually. I want it this morning.

Because you believe this. You do. You believe it beautifully on behalf of other people. You would tell a friend, with total conviction, that she is loved and there is nothing to prove and that God is not keeping score. It is only when you turn it around and point it at yourself that the sentence goes flat, and that is not a faith problem, that is a mirror problem, and the mirror has been lying to you since you were about eleven.

So let me say it in the direction you cannot say it. He loved you, and gave Himself for you, and He was not settling a group account. He knew your name and your left column and He did not flinch at either one. That is written in the singular in Galatians 2:20, and turning it round to point at you is the Spirit's work rather than a trick of positive thinking.