The Ledger I Audit Every Year

It is a real notebook and it is not a metaphor. Hard covers. He is on his fourth.

He would not call it a ledger and he would be uncomfortable with the word, but that is what it is. Dated entries, going back twenty-two years. Not a diary. A diary records what happened. This records only what he got wrong, and it records it accurately, without self-pity and without exaggeration, because he is a precise man and he would think exaggeration a form of dishonesty.

Once a year, in the same week, he goes through it. All of it, from the beginning. Line by line.

He would tell you it is a discipline and that it keeps him honest, and there is something in that, and it is not the whole of it and he knows it is not.

Here is the part that has never been said out loud to anybody. In twenty-two years, not one entry has ever been closed. Not one. He has confessed nearly all of them, most of them repeatedly, and the confessing does not close them. They stay on the page, and they stay in the audit, and every year the audit takes slightly longer than the year before.

He is fifty-nine. He has taught for a long time. If you asked him about assurance he would answer you carefully and correctly and you would be helped.

And people have said the sentence to him. His wife. A colleague, once, in a corridor, which was awkward for both of them. You have to forgive yourself.

And every time, in a place he has never put into words: he cannot locate the mechanism. Which is not a small thing for a man who has spent his life locating mechanisms.

Maybe you keep a ledger. It may not be a notebook. It may be entirely in your head and still be perfectly itemized. And maybe somebody has told you to forgive yourself and you had no idea what procedure was being proposed.

Sit down here by the lamp. Nothing coming is going to hand you a procedure.

There is no clerk in that office

Let me put it structurally, because that is how you will actually hear it.

The reason no entry ever closes is not that the entries are unusually serious, and it is not that the confessing has been inadequate. It is that the ledger has no clerk with the authority to close anything. A clerk who could close an entry would have to be somebody other than the person who wrote it, and in that notebook the author, the auditor and the clerk are the same man.

And the second transaction people keep recommending, forgiving yourself, is not a clerk either. It does not exist. Nowhere in Scripture does a person forgive himself. Nobody in the book does it, nobody is instructed to, and the phrase does not occur. It came into ordinary speech within the last century, mostly from people trying to name something real. You have not been failing at anything, and Scripture never once puts a second forgiveness between a man and his rest, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept you unable to find a mechanism that was never built.

Then He adds, I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more. Where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer any offering for sin.Hebrews 10:17-18

Read the second sentence, because that is the structural one and almost nobody quotes it. Where there is forgiveness, there is no longer any offering. The writer is saying that once the debt is settled, the machinery for settling it is decommissioned. Not idle. Gone. There is nothing left to bring, because there is nothing left outstanding to bring it for.

You have been running an offering system that Scripture says was retired, and Hebrews 10 is where that is written, and it is His Spirit who reports on what remains outstanding and not your fourth notebook.

What the audit actually is

So what has been happening for twenty-two years? Something real, and the name for it is not confession.

An account has been kept open by its own auditor.

Every entry is accurate. That is the striking thing and it is why this has survived so long: there is nothing in that book that is false, and a precise man is not going to abandon a true record. But accuracy is not the question. A settled account can hold accurate entries and still be settled, because settlement is not about the truth of the lines, it is about who has signed the account off.

And the account has been signed off. It was signed off outside that study entirely, by somebody with authority the auditor does not have, and the audit has been running ever since in a room where the signature is not read out.

You were never appointed the clerk of this account, and 1 Corinthians 4 says Paul refused to judge even himself and left the verdict to the Lord, and it is the Spirit who lifts a man out of a chair he was never qualified to sit in. If Paul would not audit himself, no scholar was ever meant to do it annually for twenty-two years.

Not a step to add, an audit to stop

Here is the turn, and it is a cessation and not an addition.

The problem was never a second forgiveness left unobtained. The problem is a first thing that was never yours to do: auditing an account God has already closed, in a room where His signature on it is never entered into evidence.

Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls.Romans 14:4

So the move is not to forgive yourself. The move is to say out loud that you are not the judge in this, and then to say who is. That is the whole of it. There is no technique in it and nothing to phrase correctly, and it will not feel like a result. It is a man closing a book he had no authority to keep open.

You have an account that was signed off by the only party with standing to sign it, and it is written that there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit is what makes that a fact about a man with four hard covered notebooks.