He Moved Before I Did

There is a carrier bag hanging on the handle of her shed door and she can see from twenty yards away what is in it. Runner beans. Half a bag of them, the long ones from the far end that always do better than hers, and something else underneath, a jar with a bit of kitchen roll folded over the top.

She knows exactly who. The man three plots down with the good beans and the bad knees. He does not do notes. He does not do a knock. He just hangs things on handles and gets on with his morning, and by the time she is standing there with her hand on the bag he is already bent over his onions with his back to her, which is his way of saying that this is not a conversation.

And here is what happens in her chest, and it happens before anything else does. Not gladness. Arithmetic. She has parsley coming through and there is the raspberry cane she was going to thin and did she still have those seed trays, and by the time she has got the bag inside the shed and the kettle on she has built a whole small ledger in her head, and she is unhappy, on a beautiful morning, holding free beans.

You know that. Perhaps not on a community garden. Perhaps yours is the friend who always pays for coffee, or the neighbor who took your bins out for six weeks and never said, or the person who sat with you in the worst month of your life and does not appear to want anything. Somebody gives you something and the first movement in you is not thank you. It is what do I owe.

And I think you may have brought that into the room where you pray. I think the first thing that happens when you talk to God is a kind of settling up. An apology first. A quick account of the week. Somewhere along the way He stopped being somebody who gives you things and became somebody you are behind with, and you cannot remember the day it changed, and nobody taught you to say it out loud.

Who moved first

I want to go slowly here, because this is not a scolding and I have no intention of adding one more thing to your list.

There is a line near the end of the New Testament that is four words long in the middle and does all the work.

We love because he first loved us.1 John 4:19

First. It is the whole grammar of God, and once that little word is noticed it cannot be unnoticed, because He does it in every scene He appears in.

Light, before there was anybody with eyes to see it. A garden planted and grown and watered before the man who would walk in it had been formed. Clothes made, by hand, for two people who had just hidden from Him in the bushes, and He did not stand there waiting for the apology to reach an acceptable standard first. He made the coats.

And the biggest one of all, the one that sets the shape of the whole covenant. When God comes down at Sinai and speaks the Ten Words to a nation, listen to how the first sentence goes. I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. The rescue is stated before the first instruction is given. They were already out. They were already His. Not one command was issued to a people still in chains as the price of getting the chains off.

So hear this over you, in the shed with the kettle going. You are not behind with God, and the reason is not that He is lenient about arrears; it is that no account was ever opened. What is written says He loved first, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that sentence into you now, because a thing this contrary to how you have lived does not go in on the strength of my saying it.

The basket and the words over it

There is a beautiful old picture of what a response looks like when it is not a payment, and it is worth standing in front of for a minute.

A farmer brings the first of what has come up. He puts it in a basket. He carries it, and he sets it down, and then he says a set of words over it, and here is the thing that undoes the whole transactional reading: the words are not a request and they are not an invoice. They are a memory. He recites what God did. He starts with an ancestor who had nothing, he goes through the years in a country that was not his, he says God heard, God saw, God brought us out, God brought us here, and He gave us this ground. And then, last, at the end of all that recital, he says: and so I have brought the first of it.

The basket is a sentence with the word therefore in front of it. It is an answer. Everything true in it happened before the farmer put a single seed in the earth.

You have that same posture available to you this morning, and Deuteronomy 26 is where it is written down, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes an ancient basket feel like something you are actually holding. Not a bill arriving. A memory being said out loud.

Nothing is being asked of you

I want to be plain, because on a subject with this name people have been asked for a great many things and told it was worship.

Nothing is being asked of you here. Not today, not at the end, not quietly in the last paragraph. This message has no requirement in it, no proportion, no schedule and no threshold, and there is no arrangement in which your response makes God more disposed toward you than He already is, because a first that has to be answered is not a gift, it is an invoice with a bow on it, and God does not do those.

You are loved on a day when you bring Him nothing at all. You were loved before the first thing you ever brought Him, and what is written is what says so, and His Spirit is what makes it something other than a nice idea.

The only thing that changes when you see this is the direction you are facing. You stop coming to God to settle up and you start coming to Him because He has already been generous, and those are two completely different rooms with the same furniture in them.