Three Hours Away

He was three hours away. That is the whole of it and it takes four words.

There was a reason he was three hours away and it was a good reason, and everybody who has ever heard it has said so, and he has stopped telling people because he cannot stand the sound of himself producing it. It sounds, in his own mouth, like a man building a defense, and a man who is building a defense has already conceded that there is a case.

He is the eldest. In that family that is not a birth order, it is a job description, and he has done it since he was nineteen. He is the one who is called. He has driven through the night more times than he can count. He has sat in more waiting rooms than his brothers put together.

And on that one night he was three hours away.

Four years on, and here is what people say to him, all of them meaning it kindly, most of them having no idea what they are asking. You have to forgive yourself. His sister says it. His wife said it twice in one week last spring and then stopped, because she saw what it did to his face. A very good man at his church said it with a hand on his shoulder and full sincerity.

And every time, the same thing happens in him, which he has never said out loud to a single person: he does not know what they are describing.

He knows what it is to be forgiven by God. That happened. He took it there, properly, on his knees, in a room, and something real occurred. He is not confused about it. What he cannot locate is the second thing. Where is that office. What are its hours. What is the procedure, what is the form, and who signs it, and how would a man know it had gone through.

So for four years he has been failing to complete a transaction that nobody has ever been able to describe to him.

Maybe you have been told to forgive yourself. And maybe you have nodded, and gone away, and had no idea at all what you were supposed to actually do, and quietly concluded that the failure is one more thing on your account.

Sit down at the table. Nothing here is going to hand you a procedure.

There is no second pardon to get

Let me say the thing that nobody has said to you, and it will either be a relief or an offense and it may take a day to work out which.

That transaction does not exist.

Not in the sense that it is difficult, or that it takes time, or that you have not managed it yet. It does not exist. There is no verse anywhere in Scripture where a person forgives himself. Nobody in the Bible does it. Nobody is instructed to do it. The phrase is not there. It came into ordinary speech in the last hundred years or so, and it is often said by kind people who are trying to name something real, but the thing they are naming is not a second pardon and there is no counter you have been failing to reach.

You have not been failing at anything, and Scripture never once puts a second forgiveness between a man and his peace, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept you unable to find an office that was never built. Four years of failing to do something that cannot be done is not a character flaw. It is the correct result.

Instead of your shame there shall be a double portion; instead of dishonor they shall rejoice in their lot.Isaiah 61:7

Look at the direction of travel in that verse. Nobody in it does anything to themselves. It is all done to them. You are on the receiving end of that sentence and not the performing end, and Isaiah 61 is where it is written, and it is His Spirit who does the exchanging.

What you have actually been doing

So if the transaction does not exist, what has been happening for four years? Something real, and it has a name, and the name is not forgiveness.

A court has been convened.

There is a bench, and you sit on it. There is a defendant, and it is also you. There is a prosecutor who is extremely well prepared and knows the case in detail, and he is also you. There is no defense counsel, because every time one stands up you rule him out of order for building a defense. And this court sits most days, usually early, and it has never once reached a verdict, because a court with no jurisdiction cannot deliver one. It can only stay in session.

That is the actual shape of the last four years. Not a failure to forgive. A trial with no end, in a room with no authority.

You were never appointed to that bench, 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 sit in it, it was never a chair for eldest sons.

Not a step to add, a bench to step down from

Here is where this turns, and it is not the addition of anything.

The problem was never a second thing left undone. The problem is a first thing that was never yours to do: holding a case that God has already closed. And a man cannot close a case he was never authorized to open. What he can do is step down.

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

Read who that verse takes the gavel away from. Anybody who is not the master. You are the servant in that sentence and not the master, and Romans 14 is where the jurisdiction is settled, and it is the Holy Spirit who tells a man whose servant he actually is.

So the move is not to forgive yourself. The move is to say out loud that you are not the judge, and then to say who is. That is the whole of it, and it is not a technique and there is nothing to get right. It is a man stepping off a bench and walking out of a courtroom that was never a courtroom.

You have a case that was closed by the only judge with standing in 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 three hours away on a bad night.