Not Finished With Him

The call lasted forty minutes and most of it was him.

He rang about half past eight, which is late for him, and you could hear straight off that he had been sitting with it a while before he picked up the phone. He talked about the job and then he talked around the job, and then somewhere near the end he said the real thing, which was that he thinks he has made a mess of the last six years and that he does not know how a man comes back from that.

And you said what you said.

You said: God is not finished with you.

You did not say it as a comfort. You said it the way a man says a fact about weather. You told him that you have watched God take longer roads than this with harder men than him. You told him that six years is not the whole ledger. You told him you would be here on Sunday and that he should come and eat.

He went quiet for a bit and then he said thanks, Dad, and you could hear that something had shifted.

And you hung up.

And you stood in the kitchen with your hand still on the phone, and the kettle had gone cold, and you looked out at the yard for a long minute.

Because there is a version of that sentence with your own name in it, and you have not been able to say it since the winter of the year the second place went under.

I want to say something plain before we go further, because I know how a man like you takes a thing like this.

I am not here to tell you off.

There is nothing to be embarrassed about, and I have not caught you out at anything. You have known this about yourself for years and you have kept it to yourself the way you keep most things. I am not going to hold it up in the light and turn it round.

I am only saying I heard both halves of that phone call. The one you said out loud and the one you did not.

Who does the finishing

Let me put one line in front of you and then get out of the way.

Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.Philippians 1:6

Now read the middle of it, because the middle is where men like you get caught.

He which hath begun.

The one doing the beginning and the one doing the performing are the same person, and neither of them is you. Paul is not confident about the Philippians. He says so. He is confident about the One who started it, and he takes his confidence from the character of the starter rather than the track record of the material.

Which means what you said to your son on the phone was not a kindness. It was doctrine, and you preached it accurately, and you did it without notes at half past eight at night.

So let me turn it round and speak it straight at you, because I do not think anyone has done that for a long while.

You are a good work He began. Not one day, not once the accounts look better, not when the last six years have been paid off somehow. Right now, standing at that counter with your hand on a cold phone, you are in the same clause your son is in, and you did not get put there on merit and you cannot get taken out of it on a bad decade. I am not offering you my opinion. That is what is written, and it is His Spirit who takes a written line and lands it in a real chest at the end of a long day.

Now, why can you say it about him and not about you?

I have thought about this a lot with men your age. I do not think it is theology. Your theology is fine; you just quoted it correctly down a telephone.

It is that you stood in the room. You know what happened that winter and what did not, and a man who was standing there does not get to be generous with himself the way he can be with somebody else. Your son gets the benefit of the doubt because you cannot see the inside of his head. You do not extend the same to yourself, because you can.

But look at what Philippians does not say. It does not say he which hath begun a good work in the ones who did not make a mess of it. There is no clause about the quality of the years in between. The verse is about a workman who does not leave a job standing open, and a workman like that is judged by his own finishing, not by how the timber behaved.

And take this in, because it is already decided rather than pending. You have not been written off, and the write off was never yours to issue. The word says He performs it until the day of Jesus Christ, which is a considerable way further out than the winter of a bad year, and the Holy Spirit did not stop working in a man because the man stopped expecting Him to.

That flame did not go out. It went quiet, which is a different thing, and a man who has worked a stove knows the difference.