Make It Right With Them First

There were four of them in the water that day and three of them came out, and the one who did not was the one with the two little girls.

He was in the boat. He was not in the water, and there is nothing anybody can point at that he did wrong, and every single person involved has told him that, more than once, over years.

What he did wrong came after.

At the funeral he stood up and said in front of two hundred people that those girls had a second father from that day, and he meant it in his whole body, and he said it to God on the way home that night as well, alone, in the truck, which is the version that counts to him.

He did it for about seven months. He was there constantly. Then the mother started seeing somebody, and it got complicated, and he pulled back a little to be respectful, which was a real reason, and then the pulling back turned into distance and the distance turned into nothing at all, and about two years after the funeral they moved to the mainland.

The girls are fifteen and seventeen now.

He has a number for the mother that he is fairly sure still works. He has never used it. He has written the message about nine times over the years and has never sent one.

And what he has decided, in the quiet, is that he is not going to God about any of this until he has made it right with them. That is the order. You do not go and ask the Lord for peace about a thing you have not repaired. You repair it, and then you come.

The trouble is that it cannot be repaired. They are gone, the years are gone, and a man cannot hand back seven years of somebody's childhood.

So the condition he set is one he can never satisfy, which means he has effectively decided never to come at all, and he has been living under that quietly for a very long time.

The order of things

Now let me look straight at the rule, because it is a good rule and it comes from a good place and it is still not from Him.

Repair it, then come. That is a decent instinct. It is what an honorable man believes and it is what your father would have said, and there are situations in ordinary life where it is exactly right.

But notice what it does when the repair is impossible. It converts a rule about order into a permanent exclusion, and it does it silently, and the man carrying it never notices the moment it stopped being about sequence and started being about never.

So read what Paul says about how anybody gets in at all, and read the last clause slowly because it is the one that names the motive under a rule like yours.

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.Ephesians 2:8-9

You are held by a gift, and the whole design of it is that no repair could ever be its price. Ephesians 2:8 says not of yourselves and calls it the gift of God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been holding it out to you across every message you never sent.

Not of yourselves

Three phrases and each one closes a door you have been trying to open.

By grace. Which means the initiative is not yours.

Through faith, and that not of yourselves. Even the receiving is not something you generated.

It is the gift of God. Not a wage, not a settlement, not a thing you square up for.

And then: not of works, lest any man should boast. That last clause is doing something specific. It names why God built it this way. Not because works are worthless, but because a man who got in on his own repair work would have a claim, and a claim is the beginning of boasting, and boasting is the end of gratitude.

You are held by a gift, and the whole design of it is that nothing you could bring would be the price. Ephesians 2:8-9 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of a letter and puts it in a truck outside a funeral home.

And here is the thing your rule has been hiding, which I say gently because it is tender.

Repair it and then come is a way of staying in charge of your own guilt. If the door is locked until you fix it, then the fixing is yours, the timing is yours, and nobody gets to hand you anything you have not earned. Which sounds like integrity and functions as a wall.

You are being given something you did not build and cannot repay, and refusing to receive it is not integrity. Scripture says not of yourselves and calls it a gift, and the Spirit of God has been holding it out to you across every one of those nine unsent messages.

Nothing goes back on

Now let me guard this, because this is where sermons do damage.

I am not taking restitution off you and handing you a lighter obligation. I am not saying that instead of repairing it you must at least send the message, or at least be willing to, or at least pray about the girls every day. Any of those, put where the old condition was, is the same lock with a smaller key.

The condition comes off. Nothing goes on.

You stand inside on His terms this evening, and His terms were satisfied entirely by Him. The word puts it plainly, and that is what it means that it is the gift of God and not of works, and His Spirit has been carrying you through all the years you were trying to find a way to pay.

Will He put something in front of you about that family? He might. He might put that number in your hand on an ordinary Tuesday and you will do it without rehearsing it. That is what happens inside a house. It is not the toll on the road in.