Just Bring Yourself

Danny has been round the block once already and he is coming round again, slowly, past the same red car with the flat back tire that has not moved since spring.

The house is forty yards away and there are people in it. He can see the front room window from here. Somebody's grandchild is standing on the arm of the sofa being told to get down, and there is a dog doing the thing dogs do when a door goes, and the smell of a Sunday dinner is out on the street where the extractor fan sits.

He has been to this house a hundred times. He has fixed their gate. He knows where the spare key is kept and he has let himself in with it.

And his hands are empty, and he cannot walk up the path.

It is not a decision he has made. It is older than a decision. His mother did not go anywhere empty handed and neither has he, not once, not in forty years, and today there is nothing in his hands and there was nothing he could do about that, and the whole way here his head has been running the same list it always runs, going through what he might have brought and crossing each thing off.

Then the door opens before he reaches it, because they have seen him from the window, and she is already talking, halfway through a sentence about the oven, and she has hold of his sleeve, and she pulls him in.

She never looks at his hands. Not once. It does not occur to her that there is anything to look at.

You know the walk round the block. Perhaps not with a Sunday dinner. But there is a subject that does this to you, and the moment it comes up in a room, or in a sermon, or in a paragraph like this one, something starts running in your head that has nothing to do with God and everything to do with a figure you cannot manage, and you go round the block one more time rather than walk up the path.

Nothing is being collected here

Let me settle the important thing at the top, because the rest is no use to you until it is settled.

Nothing is being asked of you in this article. Not a small thing, not a token, not something instead of a thing. There is no plate at the end of it, no suggestion, no hint dressed up as a principle, and nothing you will be quietly measured against when you finish reading. You may read the whole of it with your hands in your pockets. That is not a technique to get you relaxed before a request arrives later. There is no later.

Hear this while you are still standing on the sidewalk. You are welcome exactly as you came today, and the door was open before you worked out what you were bringing. Scripture puts it in the language of access, and it is one and the same Spirit who brings a person through, which means nobody is standing at that door running a check on what is in your hands.

For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.Ephesians 2:18

Sit with the word access for a moment. Paul is writing to people who knew exactly what it meant to be the outsiders in a room, and he does not tell them they have been given terms. He tells them they have been given a way in, by Christ, through the Spirit, to the Father. Three persons in one short line and no doorkeeper anywhere in it.

Now, the subject this site is named for, plainly, because plainness is the kindness here.

The first of a harvest, in Scripture, was brought before the rest of it was touched. The first sheaf went to the house of God while the field was still standing. And read what the ceremony is actually saying, because it is not a payment and it never was. A man carrying a first sheaf is saying one sentence with his arms: this came from You. He is not settling an account. There is nothing he could give that God did not already own, and the whole world knew that; Scripture says so outright, that the earth is the Lord's and everything in it. What the first is, and all it has ever been, is an acknowledgement of source.

That is why it went first. Not because God is impatient. Because a thing acknowledged at the end is an afterthought, and a thing acknowledged at the start has told the truth about where it came from.

Whether any of that lands as an obligation on a believer today is an argument with people of good faith on both sides of it, and this article declines it and will go on declining it. It is not being settled here and no verdict on it is hiding in the next paragraph. What is being said is what the thing itself meant, and the meaning has never once been a bill.

So take this where you are, whatever this month has actually looked like in your house. You have not fallen behind with God. What is written puts the access in Christ's hands rather than in yours, and it is His Spirit who brings you in, so there is no arrears here for you to clear before you are welcome to sit down.

There is one more thing to take off you, and it is heavier than the money ever was. It is the suspicion that you are being handled. That the warmth in a piece like this is the softening before the ask, because that has happened to you and you have learned to read it. I know of nothing to do about that except to reach the end of the article without asking, which is what is going to happen.