It Never Survives the Drive Home

There is a service once a year in that congregation where people are given time to confess, out loud or in silence, and he has been to twenty-two of them.

He does not treat it lightly. Nobody has ever accused him of treating anything lightly. He prepares for it, in the sense that he thinks in the week before, and he goes with something specific rather than a general sense of being a person who needs mercy. Twenty-two years and it has been the same one thing every time.

And every year the same shape. In the room, something lifts. It is genuine. He is not manufacturing it and he is not the kind of man who could. There is a period of perhaps forty minutes, from the middle of the service to the point where he is getting his coat, in which it is off him.

Then he walks to the car, and he drives, and it is fine down the main road and fine at the lights, and then somewhere on his own street it begins to come back, and by the time the key is in the door it is sitting exactly where it always sits.

Twenty-two years.

He is a precise man. He has noticed that the forty minutes has not got longer over two decades, which he has taken, in a quiet way he has never said aloud, as the most damning data available. Twenty-two applications and no cumulative effect. In any other field that would be a finding.

He has never mentioned it. Not to his wife, who goes to the same service and has no idea. Not to his oldest friend. Not to the teacher he has studied under for years. Because a man in his position is supposed to be able to say something reassuring about this to somebody else, and there is no way to raise it that does not sound like the whole framework has quietly failed on him.

Maybe you have a forty minutes. It might be a service, or a conversation, or a really good Sunday, and it lifts, and it comes back at the door. And you have stopped reading that as a feature of how bodies work and started reading it as a report on your standing.

Sit down here by the lamp. Nothing here will tell you the forty minutes is nothing.

A duration is not a verdict

Let me set the distinction out properly, because everything else here depends on it.

There is what is legally true about a man and there is how long a feeling stays. Those are two entirely different objects. One is a status and the other is a duration. A status does not have a half life. A feeling does, and a short one is not evidence about a status any more than a short night's sleep is evidence about whether you own the house.

For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.Jeremiah 31:34

Read the tense and read who is doing it. I will forgive. I will remember no more. Both verbs belong to God, and neither of them is conditional on anything happening in a man on a street at half past nine at night.

You are covered by a decision that was taken on the other side entirely, and Jeremiah 31 is where God says it in His own voice, and it is the Holy Spirit who reports on what God remembers and not the moment your key goes in the door.

And notice what is not there. No promise about how a body feels afterward, no promise about duration, nothing about a cumulative effect over twenty-two applications. You have been auditing God against a metric He never published, and what He did publish is about what He remembers, and His Spirit is the one who keeps a careful man reading the actual sentence.

Twenty-two years with no cumulative effect

Now the finding, because it is the thing that has done the real damage and it deserves a proper answer rather than a kind word.

Your reasoning is that twenty-two applications with no lengthening of the effect is a result. And in a field where the thing being applied is a treatment, you would be right. But the confession was never a treatment and the forty minutes was never the outcome being measured.

Here is what the forty minutes actually is. It is the ordinary behavior of a nervous system in a room that is quiet, unhurried, communal, and free of demand. That is why it lifts, and it is also why it comes back on a street, which is a place with none of those properties. What has been measured for twenty-two years is not whether a man is forgiven. It is the difference between a sanctuary and a driveway.

And that would be true of a man with nothing on his conscience at all. Put him in that same room and something would lift off him too, and it would come back at his door, and he would think nothing of it, because he has not been reading the meter.

You are not running a failed experiment, and Romans 8 says it is God who justifies and asks who is to condemn, and the Spirit is the one who settles a status and does not renegotiate it on a residential street.

I am not going to promise the forty minutes grows

Here is the honest part, and I will not tell you what somebody probably told you once with the best intentions.

I do not know that the interval will lengthen. It may not. There are people who carry a thing lightly for a season each year and heavily the rest, for decades, and are entirely reconciled to God every day of it. There is no timetable in Scripture and I will not invent one because it would make this article end more satisfyingly than the truth does.

What I will say is that the interval was never what made the pardon real, so it has never been in a position to unmake it. You were cleared by a finished work and not by a durable feeling, and Hebrews 10 says by one offering He has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified, and the Spirit is what holds that up on a street at half past nine when the weight comes back.

And here is what you are allowed to do, and I doubt anybody has put it to you. You are allowed to say the true thing out loud at the exact moment the weight returns. Not in the room where it is easy. At the door, with the key in your hand, in the worst thirty seconds of the year. That is not pretending, because pretending would be telling your wife the service was wonderful and leaving it there. Saying the verdict as the weight sits back down is the opposite of pretending: it is telling the truth about the ruling and the truth about the driveway in one breath.