Still Introducing Himself By It

The basement smells like coffee and floor wax and the particular warm dust of a radiator that has been running since October.

Folding chairs in a rough circle. A card table with the big urn on it, the kind with the little red light, and a plate of something somebody's wife sent. Eleven people, and the ones who got here early have been telling a story about a dog and the whole corner of the room is laughing.

He comes down the stairs, hangs his coat on the back of a chair, gets his coffee, and sits.

And when it comes around to him, he says the sentence.

He has said this sentence in every room he has walked into for eight years. He says it in church basements and at the fire hall and at his nephew's wedding, kindly and quickly, in the first two minutes, before anybody has to wonder. He says it the way a man puts his cards face up so nobody can say later that he hid anything.

Eight years clear. Eight.

Nobody in this basement needs the sentence. Half of them were not even here when it was true. The two who were here have long since stopped hearing it as news, and one of them, a big quiet man who fixes furnaces, once said to him in the parking lot, not unkindly, "You know you can just say your name."

He laughed at that. He thought about it for four days.

Because here is what he could not say back in the parking lot. The sentence is not shame. He is not ashamed, or not mainly. The sentence goes first through every door because it is the only thing he is sure is interesting about him, and if he stops saying it, he genuinely does not know what he would put in its place.

Eight years is a long time. He has done a great deal in eight years. He has shown up for people at two in the morning. He has learned a trade. He is the one everybody calls when a thing needs organizing, and the reason this room has an urn at all is that he went and got one.

And none of that has ever been said about him out loud, by anybody, including him.

The dog story starts up again in the corner and he laughs, and somebody hands him the plate and tells him to take two, and the radiator ticks, and it is a good room and he is glad he came.

You know this. I am not going to ask you what your sentence is and I am not going to guess at it. But you know exactly what it is to be years clear of a thing and still lead with it, because nobody has ever handed you anything newer to say, and you have never once caught yourself wondering what you were let out for.

Bought Out Of, and Bought For

Every one of us knows the first half of redemption and almost nobody has been handed the second.

The first half is what you were bought out of. That gets preached, and it should, and it is where a man's gratitude lives, and there is nothing wrong with it except that it is half. If it is all you have ever been given, then the most important fact about you stays permanently in the past tense, and the only true and vivid thing you can say about yourself is a thing that stopped being true eight years ago.

The second half is what you were bought for. And Scripture is not shy about it. Nobody in the old law ever redeemed a field in order to leave it standing empty. You buy back a field because you intend to plant it.

You are bought for something and not only out of something, and there is a use in it that was decided before you were free. Scripture says we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the tidiness of that idea, who makes a prepared work feel like a real one to a man in a church basement.

For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you an expected end.Jeremiah 29:11

Read what God is claiming there, because it is bigger than the greeting card version. He is not saying He has nice feelings about you. He is saying He has been thinking, deliberately, in a settled direction, toward a specific end that He expects, and that the whole line of thought has peace in it and no harm anywhere.

And He said it to a people in exile who had gotten there partly by their own doing, which is exactly why it is quoted at you here and not somewhere gentler. Those thoughts were toward a nation with a real record and a real cause for it, and God did not say a word about that record before He said an end He had already picked.

You are being thought toward, right now, in a settled direction that has an end already chosen in it. It is written that His thoughts toward you are thoughts of peace and an expected end, and His Spirit is the one who takes that off the wall of a hallway and lays it over one actual man's next eight years.

Purpose Is Not the Repayment Plan

Now I have to guard this, because the trap is right here and it is the trap this whole message exists to close.

The second a man hears that he was bought for something, everything in him wants to turn it into a repayment. He starts calculating what he owes given what he was let out of. He picks up the purpose the way a man picks up a shift he has been assigned, and eight years of leading with the old sentence becomes eight years of working off the old sentence, and the only thing that has changed is the vocabulary.

That is not what a redeemed field is for. The field is not planted to pay the redeemer back for the field. It is planted because that is what a field is, and because the one who bought it wanted a crop and not an empty lot.

You are not working anything off, and nothing that lies ahead of you is a payment on what lies behind you. Scripture says it is by grace you have been saved through faith, not of works, and then says in the very next breath that we are made for good works, and it is the Holy Spirit who holds those two sentences together in a man without letting the second one become a bill.

And that is why He gave you a use rather than a debt. A debt looks backward and shrinks with every hour you serve. A use looks forward and grows. One of them tells you what you were. The other one tells you what you are.

You have been given work that faces forward, and it is not the interesting half of your life that lies behind you. He promised in His word an expected end and a hope, and it is the same Spirit who raised Christ who is at this moment putting a future in the mouth of a man who has had nothing newer to say for eight years.