A Month Off the Schedule

The foyer is loud with the after-service crowd, children under the coat rail, somebody's toddler being handed over a shoulder, and the woman who runs the schedules catches his sleeve on his way to the door with the cheerful face of somebody bringing good news.

We have got you a month off, she says. New people have come forward. You have done years, you and your wife should have some Sundays. And she pats his arm and is gone into the crowd, pleased with herself, because she is right, and it is kind.

He smiles, because that is what you do. He says thank you. And on the way to the car his stomach does the thing it did at school when the teacher said, without explanation, that she wanted to see him after the lesson.

Understand what he is. He has been a Christian for eleven years, and he was forgiven of a great deal at the start of them, and he knows it, and he has never once doubted the doctrine of it. And in those eleven years he has never missed a Sunday, never turned down a shift, arrived first, left last, and carried the whole thing the way you carry a tray with a full cup on it: steadily, watching it, never quite putting it down. If you asked him why, he would say he was grateful. That is true. It is also true that he has never in eleven years spent a Sunday morning at home without a low feeling that somebody, somewhere, was noting it.

So he drives home with a month off, and he cannot sit down. His wife puts the kettle on and he goes out to the garage. The garage does not need sweeping. He sweeps it. He sweeps it properly, corners and all, and stands there afterwards holding a broom in a clean garage on a free Sunday, and the feeling in him is not rest. It is the feeling of a man who has been let off and does not believe it, and is waiting to be sent for.

He has been forgiven for eleven years and he is living like somebody on probation.

You know that garage. Maybe your broom is a schedule, or a study you never miss, or a standard you hold yourself to that nobody set, or a running count in your head of the things you did for God this week that you would be embarrassed to admit you were keeping. You believe you are forgiven. You could argue it from Scripture. And you have never once, in all the years since, taken a day off from earning it.

The word Paul uses for a life like this

Let me name the thing exactly, because I keep books and an unnamed liability is the one that sinks you.

Probation is a status between guilty and free. It is what a court gives a person it has decided not to punish, on condition. Out, but reporting in. Not in the cell, and not off the record either, and one missed appointment reopens the whole thing. A great many forgiven people live inside that shape without ever having been sentenced to it, because it is what forgiveness feels like to somebody who has not been told what forgiveness is.

Paul knew the shape and he wrote against it by name.

For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, Abba! Father!Romans 8:15

Two spirits, and he says which one you were given. Not the spirit of slavery, whose whole work is to make you fall back into fear, which is the garage exactly: the fall back, the low feeling, the sense of a summons. The Spirit of adoption. And adoption is not a status you keep up. A court does not put an adopted child on probation. The child is placed as a son, in whom, Paul says, we cry Abba, which is a word a small child uses at a father and not the word a probationer uses at an officer.

Hear this over yourself now, standing in the garage.

You have the Spirit of adoption and not the spirit of slavery, and Romans 8 says which one you received, and the Holy Spirit who was given is not a supervisor checking your attendance but the One inside you crying Father.

You were placed as a son and not let off on condition, and that is what is written in the same chapter, and placement is not reviewed monthly by anybody, and the Spirit of adoption is the proof that it went through.

The son who never left and lived like a hired man

Jesus told a story that everybody remembers for the boy who went away, and almost nobody remembers for the boy who stayed, and the boy who stayed is you.

When the younger son came home and the music started, the elder brother stood outside the house and would not go in. And when his father came out to him, here is what he said: these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, and you never gave me a young goat so that I could celebrate with my friends (Luke 15:29). Look at the grammar. Served. Never disobeyed. Never gave me. That is the speech of a man who has been on the farm his whole life as if he were on probation on it, keeping his record clean, waiting for the small reward that would prove he had done enough, and it never came, because it was never that kind of house.

And now listen to the father, because he does not do what you expect. He does not tell the elder son that his years of service were worthless. He does not say your diligence was contemptible, and neither will I; the man worked, and the work was real, and God is not in the business of sneering at a person's faithfulness. What the father does is correct the status. Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours (Luke 15:31). Always with me. Not on review. Not on a schedule. All that is mine is yours, which is not the wage of a hired man, it is the inheritance of a child, and it was his the entire time he was out in the field keeping count.

You are that son, and everything that is the Father's is yours, and it was yours on every one of the eleven years of Sundays, and Luke 15 has the father saying so in his own words, and the Spirit of adoption is the one who takes a line from a parable and lands it in a man's chest in a garage. The years were not wasted. They were simply spent by a son who thought he was staff.

Why the month off is a gift and not a test

So let me tell you what happened in the foyer, in the terms this site uses. What was handed over there was a piece of what you already had. A Sunday with nothing to carry is not the church deciding to see if you will cope without a role. It is a Sunday, one of the ones that belong to a son. Nothing about it is an appeal hearing, because there is no case open; Paul says in the same chapter that there is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus, and no condemnation means no file.

And here is what I want to be careful about, because the danger is that a person hears rest and turns it into a new schedule. I am not telling you to stop serving. The work can come back next week, and it will be better work, because it will be a son's and not a probationer's. What I am telling you is that today, one thing you do to keep your standing up can be left undone, on purpose, and nothing about your standing will move.

You have that freedom right now, as you read this, and Hebrews 4 says the one who has entered God's rest has rested from his own works, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a person able to sit down in a clean garage and not feel sent for.