The Certificate in the Drawer

The box lives in the bottom drawer of the dresser, under the sweatshirts, and it is gray and about the size of a bread pan.

It is the fireproof kind, with the little key that lives in the same drawer, which his wife has pointed out defeats the purpose. Inside: the passports, the deed with the surveyor's map folded into eighths, the kids' birth certificates in their long envelopes, the title to a truck he sold nine years ago.

And on top of the stack, where it always somehow ends up, the certificate.

It is Sunday afternoon and everybody else is out. He came upstairs for the insurance card and he is sitting on the end of the bed with the drawer open and the box on his knees, holding the certificate in both hands the way you hold a photograph.

Printed border. His name filled in by hand in blue ballpoint, in handwriting he does not recognize and has always assumed belonged to the church secretary. The pastor's signature, gone a little purple with age. And the date, in the little ruled box in the corner.

He reads the date again.

He is not checking because he forgot. He has known that date since he was a kid, the way you know a phone number from a house you no longer live in. He reads it because some part of him keeps hoping that this time the paper will say more than it says.

This is maybe the eleventh time. Twice in his thirties. Once, badly, in the week after his father died. And now, with the light coming in low across the bedspread and the whole house quiet.

What he wants is not written on it and never was. He wants a document that certifies the inside of a man. And because the paper will not say it, he has spent about fifteen years trying to build the certificate himself out of behavior. Read more. Get up earlier. Be better with his temper, be the man in the third row who knows the second verse. If the paper cannot confirm it, then maybe a life can.

And every time the effort slips, which is every few months, the box comes back out.

He puts the certificate back on the stack, closes the lid, and the little latch makes the sound it makes. The box goes in the drawer under the sweatshirts, and he does not find the insurance card.

You know the box. Yours might be a folder, or a flyleaf with a date on it in somebody's handwriting, or a photograph you have looked at more than anybody knows. And you know what you are actually asking it, and that it has never once answered.

What a piece of paper was built to certify

Let me be a farmer about this, because the clearest way in is to ask what kind of tool we are holding.

A certificate certifies a witnessed event. That is the whole job, and it is an honest job. It says a thing happened, on a day, in front of people, and here is a name and a signature. Deeds do it. Titles do it. The long envelope with your daughter's birth certificate in it does it.

What no certificate on earth has ever done is testify about the interior of a person.

A marriage license is a real document about a real day, and if a man went to the courthouse to find out whether he loves his wife, we would all know something had gone sideways. Not because the license is false. Because it was never issued for that purpose, and asking a true document a question it was not built to answer will make a man doubt the document and himself at once.

That is what has been happening on the end of that bed, eleven times over fifteen years. Not unbelief. A category error, carried out with great sincerity, by a man holding the wrong instrument up to the light.

You are asking a true page a question it was never printed to answer, and Scripture is where the right answer is actually filed. 1 John says the record is something God Himself gives rather than something a church secretary writes in ballpoint, and it is the Spirit who bears witness in the matter, which is a job never assigned to a signature that has gone purple with age.

The record God keeps is a Person

Now here is the sentence I want laid on the counter beside the paper.

And this is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life.1 John 5:11-12

Read what John calls the record. Not a date. Not a feeling. Not a page in a box under the sweatshirts. The record is that God has given eternal life, and the location of that life is named: it is in His Son.

That is an address, and not one a man can lose in a house move. The life is not stored in a memory of a day, or in a streak, or in a drawer. It is in Christ. And the reason John writes it plainly, twice in one sentence, is that he knew people would go looking for it in themselves.

You are being pointed at a Person instead of a paper, and the whole verse exists to make that impossible to miss. 1 John 5:11 puts the life in the Son and calls that the record, and it is the Spirit who testifies about the Son, which means the witness in this matter has never once been a man's own filing box.

And notice who does the giving. God hath given. Past tense, His verb, His action, done from His side toward people who were not consulted about the design of it.

You are dealing with something done to a man rather than accomplished by him, and the grammar of the verse is the argument. 1 John 5:11 has God giving and men receiving and never the other way around, and it is His Spirit who does that work in a person, which is exactly why fifteen years of trying harder could not manufacture the very thing it was trying to prove.

Better at it was never the road in

Now the second half, carefully, because there is a ditch on both sides and I have seen men in both.

The first ditch is the one the man on the bed is in. He is trying to accomplish, by effort, a thing that was done to him from outside. Earlier alarms, longer chapters, a shorter fuse with the kids. Every one of those is good. None of them is the mechanism.

Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost.Titus 3:5

Not by works which we have done. That is not a slight against work. It is a statement about where a thing came from, and it lands like a hand on the shoulder of a tired man.

You have permission to stop trying to build a certificate out of behavior, and the word of God is what gives that permission and not my kindness. Titus 3:5 rules out works as the source and names mercy instead, and it names the renewing of the Holy Spirit as the doing of it, which is a workload that was never handed to a man at a dresser drawer.

And now the second ditch, and I would be no shepherd if I left you in it. None of this makes obedience pointless. John himself, a few lines on in the same letter, talks about keeping commandments as the most natural thing in the world for a person who has been given life.

Work is not the road in. It is the road out. A field gets worked because it is yours, not in order to make it yours, and a man plowing his own ground is not trying to prove the deed. He is enjoying it.