He Studies the Law and Not the Purpose

The study is at the back of the house and the window faces a wall, which he says he prefers, because a view is a distraction and he has work to do.

Books on three sides, and they are not decorative. They are read. There is a shelf at eye level where the spines are broken white at the hinges, and those are the ones on redemption, and there is not a man in his town who knows the subject better. He could take you through what happened at the town gate, and who had to be present, and what a sandal changing hands was actually recording. He could explain the difference between the two Hebrew verbs the translators both render as redeem, and he would be right.

It is a quarter past nine on a Thursday and he is working on notes for something he has been asked to give in the spring.

The lamp is one of those adjustable ones and it is bent low over the desk, so that the light lies on the page and the whole rest of the room, the books, the door, the wall, sits in the dark outside the circle.

He has forty pages. He goes back through them, numbering the sections, and begins to see the shape of what he has written: a wall with a door in it, everybody coming out through the door, and the notes stopping at the doorway.

Redeemed from. That is the phrase, over and over, in his own handwriting, twenty-six years of it. From bondage. From the pit. From the hand of the enemy. From the house of slaves. Every section of it accurate and every section of it about the leaving.

He turns to the back where the loose sheets are and finds a card he wrote in the nineties, a question, in the smaller handwriting he used then, and it says: led out toward what. And under it, nothing. Not a single line. He can remember writing it. He cannot remember ever coming back to it.

He sits there with the lamp low over the page and the rest of the room dark behind him. Sixty-one years old. He gets up eventually and does not switch the lamp off, and stands in the doorway for a moment looking back at the desk with its one circle of light, and then he goes to bed.

You may be nothing like him and I think you know this feeling anyway. You know precisely what you were let out of. You could name it in a sentence, and you have thought about it for years, at traffic lights and in waiting rooms and at three in the morning. And the other half of the sentence, the part after the comma, you have simply never opened. Not because you decided it was not for you. Because it never occurred to you that there was a second half.

I want to take you to a song sung on a beach by people with wet clothes, and to one verse of it that has two verbs in it.

Led forth, and guided unto

It is the oldest song in Scripture and they sang it standing on the far shore with the water behind them. Miriam had a timbrel. The whole nation was out, and out was the entire point, and the song is mostly about the water and the horse and the rider.

Then, in the middle of it, this.

Thou in thy mercy hast led forth the people which thou hast redeemed: thou hast guided them in thy strength unto thy holy habitation.Exodus 15:13

Two verbs, and they are not the same verb, and they are not both about the leaving.

Led forth. That is the one you know. That is the one on your shelf and in your notes. Out of the house of slaves, through the water, onto the sand.

And then: guided unto. Guided is a different word entirely, and it is a shepherd's word, the same one that turns up in the psalm about being led beside still waters. It is not the verb for breaking a door down. It is the verb for walking somebody somewhere, at their pace, day after day. And it has an object at the end of it, and the object is a place: unto Thy holy habitation. There is a room at the other end of this.

You were led out and you are being guided toward, and both halves of that were spoken over you in the same breath. I am not adding a hopeful clause to your life. It is written in Exodus 15:13 with both verbs in one verse, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a song sung on a beach and lands it on a man of sixty-one with a lamp bent over his notes.

And there is something almost funny about when they sang it. They sang the destination clause on day one, soaking wet, before there was anything to see. Nobody had arrived anywhere. The whole journey was ahead of them, and they sang about the holy habitation as a settled matter, because the One who had got them out had said where they were going and that was sufficient to sing about. You are on a road with a stated destination, and the stating of it did not wait for you to be able to see it. Scripture says He guides in strength unto His holy habitation, and the Holy Spirit is named in Scripture as the one who leads the sons of God, which is a walking word and not a shouting one.

Now the part your training will resist, and I want to name it before it gets a chance to close the door. There is nothing in that verse about the people earning the second half by being grateful for the first. The mercy is in the first clause and the strength is in the second and both of them are His. They contributed the walking and nothing else, and even the road was chosen for them.

The works were laid down before you got there

Here is the trap I am going to close, because it is the one that catches men who study.

The moment somebody like you hears the word purpose, a machine starts up, and the machine says: right, so this is what I owe. He got me out, so here is the bill and the rest of my life is the paying of it. And that machine feels like devotion from the inside, and it will run a man into the ground, and it is wrong at the root.

Paul writes to Ephesus and lays it out in an order that cannot be rearranged. By grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works, so that nobody can boast. And then, immediately: for we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.

Read the word beforehand and let it do its work. They were laid down along a road before your feet were ever on it, like stepping stones set the summer before. You cannot repay somebody with a thing they made and put in place for you ahead of time. The arithmetic will not go that way round. You have been created for works that were laid down before you arrived, and you were never handed an account to settle. It is written in Ephesians 2:10 exactly like that, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a preposition that small and makes a studying man put his pen down.

So purpose here is not a debt and it is not a performance review. It is the second half of a sentence God has been speaking over your life since the day He got you out. Your part is walking, which a man can do at sixty-one with a bad knee, and it never required you to be impressive. You are being guided by somebody who already knows the address, and He has not once asked you to find it yourself. His word says He guides in His strength to His own habitation, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the guiding in a life rather than leaving a person with a map and good wishes.

And the years behind you are not deleted to make room for this. The twenty-six years of notes are not wasted and I am not going to call them wasted, and the parts of your history you would not read out are not being tidied either. The record stands. The verdict is changed. What is being handed to you tonight is not a different past, it is the clause you have never opened: what you were let out toward. You have been redeemed for something and not merely out of something, and the something was decided by the One who paid. Exodus 15:13 puts the leading and the guiding in a single line, and His Spirit is the one who makes an old song land in a room lined with books.