The Man Who Never Takes Anything

Somebody left a dish at his gate in the spring and he found out who and returned the dish full.

That is not a charming detail. That is the whole article.

Thirty years on that street. He has driven people to the hospital at four in the morning. He has lent money he has never once mentioned again. When the family at number eleven had the bad year, there was food at their door for six weeks and they still do not know for certain who arranged it, although everybody knows.

And in thirty years nobody has been able to give him anything.

Not a lift. Not a meal. Not a hand with the wall when he was doing it on his own at sixty-two in July. There is always a reason, and the reasons are good, and they arrive so fast and so warmly that nobody has ever pushed past one.

Here is what matters for this article. He is not a man in doubt about God. He settled the thing that needed settling a long time ago, properly, and he has never doubted it since. If you asked him he would tell you plainly that he is forgiven, and he would be right, and he would mean it.

And he cannot take anything from anybody.

Because underneath thirty years of giving, never stated, never examined, there is an arrangement: a man who is running a balance does not get to draw on it. Taking is what a person does who is level. He has never once believed he is level.

Maybe there is something you cannot accept. A compliment, a gift, an afternoon off, a hand with a wall. And you are not in doubt about being forgiven, and you would say so, and yet the whole shape of your week is a man working something off.

Sit down at this table. Somebody else cooked, and that is deliberate.

Probation is a legal condition and it ended

Let me put it plainly, because it is a legal matter and not a mood.

Probation is a real status. It means the sentence stands, suspended, and conduct is being observed, and the observation is what keeps the suspension in place. A man on probation is not free; he is un-imprisoned on terms.

That is exactly the shape of the last thirty years. Give, and give, and be observed giving, and never draw anything down, because drawing something down would be behaving like a man whose terms have ended.

And they ended. Not are ending. Ended, at a specific point, by a specific act, and nobody has been observing your conduct since.

But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.Galatians 4:4-7

You were made a son and not a servant on parole, and Galatians 4 is where the word slave is exchanged for the word heir, and the Holy Spirit is the one Scripture says God sent into our hearts so that we would cry Abba, Father, rather than address Him as sir. An heir does not work off a balance. There is no balance. That is the definition of the word.

You were adopted rather than paroled, and Romans 8 says you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear but the Spirit of adoption, and the Holy Spirit is the one that verse names as the difference between the two arrangements. Parole is reviewed. Adoption is not.

Your giving was never contemptible

Now something I want said carefully, because somebody could take the paragraph above and use it to make thirty years look foolish, and it is not foolish.

The driving at four in the morning was real. The six weeks of food at number eleven was real, and that family is different now because of it, and none of that is canceled by anything in this article. The giving was good. It is still good. It is not going to stop and it should not stop.

What is being taken out is not the giving. It is the arrangement underneath it.

You were never earning your standing with any of it, and Titus 3 says He saved us not because of works done by us in righteousness but according to His own mercy, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates a good work from a payment without spoiling the work. The bread at that door was never a payment. It was overflow, and it was always overflow, and nobody was ever invoicing you.

This is not a new discipline

And one more thing, before the turn, because a man like you will already be assembling one.

There is no new practice here. I am not asking you to receive things every day, or to keep a note of what you accept, or to build a discipline of taking to balance a discipline of giving. That would simply be probation with the terms rewritten, and you would be extremely good at it inside a month.

One thing, once. That is all any of this is.

You are already home and there is nothing to institute, and Luke 15 says that while he was still a long way off his father ran, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a man understand that the running had already happened before he got his speech out.

But the father said to his servants, bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet.Luke 15:22

Read what the son had prepared and never got to finish. He had a proposal: make me as one of your hired servants. A job. Terms. A way to work it off. And the father does not argue him out of it, does not counsel him about it, and does not address it at all. He simply calls for a robe, which is what a son wears, and interrupts a probation plan by making it structurally impossible to carry out.