You Have The Order Backwards

The notebook is open at the last page, because the last page is where you put the things that matter.

Your niece asked you on Sunday. Not casually either. She waited until the two of you were carrying the chairs back to the store cupboard, and then she asked how a person comes back to God after she has been where she has been, and she asked it like somebody who had been rehearsing the question for weeks.

So you told her you would write it down for her properly.

And now it is Tuesday night, and here is the notebook, and here is the pen that skips, and you are writing her the order.

One. Stop the thing you already know you have to stop.

Two. Put right what can still be put right with your mother.

Three. Get a proper morning going and keep it for a month.

Four. Then go back on a Sunday when you can look people in the eye.

It is a good list. Every item on it is true and none of it is cruel. You would stand up and defend every line in front of anybody.

And then you get to the bottom of the page and the pen stops, because the bottom is supposed to say and that is what happened to me, and it is not what happened to you.

What happened to you was a Thursday.

You were nowhere near number one. You had not begun number two and you had no intention of beginning it. You were in the exact condition the whole list exists to fix, and something came into the room and got hold of you, and your entire contribution to the proceedings was that you were in the room at the time.

The list is what you believe.

The Thursday is what happened.

And you have lived for years with those two facts stacked one on top of the other and never once laid side by side, and you have never noticed that you are handing a young woman a door you did not come through.

Somebody put your list in the wrong order

Set the notebook down for a minute.

Nothing on that page needs crossing out, and I want that said before anything else, because the correction coming is not a correction of the items.

It is a correction of the order, and the order is not a detail. You have been carrying a sequence that puts the cleaning at the front and the rescue at the back, and Titus 3:5 lays it down the other way round inside a single sentence, and the Holy Spirit is named in that same sentence as the one who does the washing rather than the one who inspects it.

He saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit.Titus 3:5

Take it apart slowly, the way anybody takes apart a thing before handing it to a young woman.

The main verb is saved, and the subject in front of it is He. Then Paul stops and does something people skip over: he says out loud what did not cause it. Not works done by us in righteousness. Look at that phrase, because he does not say bad works. He says works done in righteousness, which is to say the good ones, which is to say your list. Every honest item on that page is inside that phrase, and it is ruled out as the cause in the same breath that names what the cause actually was. His own mercy.

Then the washing, and this is where people get nervous and start hedging, so let me be plain about it. The washing is in the verse. It is not optional and nobody on this page is telling you it does not matter. What matters is whose it is. It is not something a person brings to the door in a clean shirt to be admitted. It is called the washing of regeneration and the renewal of the Holy Spirit, which makes it His work, done to a person He already has hold of.

Which is why nothing on that list was ever an entry fee, and why not one line of it was pointless either. You are not being asked to pick between the rescue and the repair, because the word puts both of them in the same sentence and only refuses to put them in your sequence, and the Spirit of God is the one who does the second half after He has done the first.

A mother whose child comes in from the yard covered to the elbows does not stand in the doorway and negotiate. She picks the child up. She gets it on her own clothes and she does not mention it. And there is a bath afterward, and the bath is not a formality and it does not get skipped and the child does not stay muddy. Every bit of that happens after the picking up, inside the house, where the water is.

So the Thursday was not an exception and it was not a shortcut. You were taken hold of in the exact condition the list exists to fix, and that is the ordinary way this works rather than a special allowance made once for you, and it is written that while we were still weak Christ died for the ungodly, and the Holy Spirit is not running a stricter edition of that for people who came back a second time.

One plain paragraph in the middle of the teaching, because this is read by people at the bottom of things and I would rather say it twice than not at all. If the thing on your list has started to include thoughts of ending your life, tell one living human being before you sleep tonight. Your doctor, a friend, a neighbor with a kettle on. In the United States, call or text 988. Anywhere else, emergency services or the crisis line nearest to where you live. That call is not a failure of faith, and nobody who picks it up hears a burden on the other end. God has always put real rescue into human hands, and reaching for one of those hands is obedience, not defeat.