It Was Always In My Name

You have been asking permission on your own ground for about eleven years.

Not out loud. Nobody has been standing at that gate telling you what you can and cannot do. It is a thing that happens in you before you act, a small pause where something checks whether this is allowed, and you have done it so long that you would have to be told about it by somebody else to notice it.

You have farmed like a good tenant. Everything maintained, nothing taken for granted, and a quiet readiness to be asked to explain yourself.

And then last month you were going through the tin box for something completely unrelated and you read the whole of a document you had read three or four times before, and this time you got to the middle of it and stopped.

Your name is in it.

Not as a party to an arrangement. Not as somebody permitted to work the ground. Your name is in the clause that says who it belongs to, and it has been in there since before the year you started doing the checking.

You have been renting from yourself for eleven years.

Let me say something first.

I am not correcting you.

There is nothing shameful in this. A man who behaves like a good tenant on his own land is a careful man rather than a foolish one, and I am not going to hand you eleven years back as a mistake.

I am saying I know what is in the middle of that document. That is all.

No more a servant

Here is Paul making the same move, and he makes it in one sentence with two words in it that do all the work.

Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ.Galatians 4:7

No more.

He does not say you may become. He does not say a change is available. He says the change has occurred and he uses the past to say it.

And then look at the second half, because Paul stacks it. Son, then heir. Not son as a term of affection with nothing attached. Son, and therefore standing, and therefore what is in the estate is not being loaned to you.

And notice who is addressed. Thou. Singular. He drops out of the plural at exactly that point in the letter, which is a thing he does when he wants it to land on one person rather than on a congregation.

So here it is, said directly to you, leaning on that gate with the mist coming off the grass.

You are an heir rather than a tenant. Not one day, not once you feel like the owner, not when somebody confirms it out loud. Right now, at sunrise with a mug in your hand, you are what Galatians calls a son and an heir, and it is stated in the past tense as a completed change. That is not my sentiment. That is what is written, and it is His Spirit who takes a written line and lands it on a real man at a real gate.

Now, about the eleven years.

I do not think it was ignorance. You had read that document three or four times.

What I think happened is that you read it as a description of somebody else's arrangement that you happened to be inside of, which is a very natural way to read a document about property when a whole life has been spent being careful.

And a man who reads a deed that way will keep checking. Not because he doubts it, but because he has never once let the middle clause land on his own name.

That is not sin. That is what carefulness does to a careful man over a long stretch.

And hear this, because it is settled rather than pending. You have standing on that ground that was not issued last month when you finally read it properly. The word says no more a servant, past tense, completed, and it is His Spirit who carries a written line into a real field at a real hour of the morning.

The gate was never locked. You had the key in your pocket and you were knocking.