The Guitar He Threw Out

It happens in aisle seven, between the bird seed and the light bulbs, and it takes about four seconds.

The song comes on over the store speakers, the way it does maybe twice a year, and it is not even the chorus that gets him. It is the second guitar underneath, the part nobody notices, the little walk down before the last verse that he could play in his sleep at twenty six years old in a room full of smoke. His left hand moves against the cart handle. Ring finger, middle, index. It moves before he has decided anything, and then he stands in the aisle with a bag of bird seed and does not move for a second.

He is fifty two. He came to faith at forty.

The guitar was a sunburst dreadnought with a burn mark on the top edge from a cigarette that was not his, and his own initials scratched under the bridge with a penknife when he was nineteen. He played it for twenty years. Bars, mostly. Weddings when the money was thin, a fire hall every Thanksgiving, one radio station in a town two hours away that put him on at eleven at night and let him play whatever he wanted.

Two weeks after he came to faith he put it out with the trash. In its case, on a Thursday morning, and then he stood at the kitchen window with his coffee until the truck came and took it.

Nobody told him to. That is the part he has never been able to explain to anybody, including his wife, who cried about it and did not say why. There was no sermon about it. He simply understood, in the way a man understands things in the first two weeks, that everything belonging to the old life went out, and the guitar was the biggest thing he owned that belonged to it.

He does not want the bars back. Twelve years, and not once, not for one hour, has he wanted the bars back.

He wants the guitar.

You know aisle seven. Yours might be a language you stopped speaking, or a box of photographs that went to the dump, or a recipe, or a whole set of people you stopped calling because they belonged to a version of you that had to go. And you know the four seconds, the ones that come out of nowhere twice a year, when your hand moves before you do.

What is that in thine hand

There is a question God asks a man at a burning bush, and it is the most practical question in the book of Exodus.

Moses has just been handed the largest assignment in the Old Testament and he is arguing, reasonably, that nobody will believe him. And God does not answer with a lecture. He asks him what he is holding.

And the LORD said unto him, What is that in thine hand? And he said, A rod.Exodus 4:2

A rod. A shepherd's staff. Forty years of Midian in one piece of wood: forty years of a man who used to be a prince and was now somebody's son in law minding somebody else's sheep in the back of the desert. That stick was the tool of the life he thought had disqualified him. It smelled of sheep. It had his hands worn into it.

And God did not send to Egypt for better equipment.

You are holding something God has already asked about, and you were holding it long before you knew He was going to ask. It is written in Exodus 4 that the question came first and the assignment came through the answer, and it is His Spirit, not any instinct of mine about your history, that makes a question asked at a bush into a question asked in an aisle.

Then read four verses further on, where Moses goes back to Egypt. Scripture stops calling it his rod. It calls it the rod of God. Same wood. Same worn grip. Same sheep smell. The thing that changed was not the object and it was not the biography attached to it. It was whose hand it was understood to be in.

You have a God whose documented method is to work with what is already in the hand, and that is on the record rather than in my opinion. Exodus 4:20 calls a shepherd's stick the rod of God, and the Spirit who moved a writer to change that one word did not need the stick replaced first.

He never asked Moses to forget Midian

Now I want to be careful, because there is a thing this argument could turn into and it is not going to.

Nobody here is telling you that throwing it out was foolish. A man who puts something out on the curb two weeks in, at real cost, with nobody watching, is a man doing devotion in the only currency he has. I honor that. God is not standing over that Thursday morning with a red pen.

But look at what the belief underneath it was, because that is the part still working twelve years later. It was that the twenty years themselves had to be erased. Not surrendered. Erased. And that is a thing Scripture never once asks of anybody.

Moses did not stop being a shepherd. He led a flock through a wilderness for forty years, and the man who taught him how to do that was a Midianite priest with sheep. Paul did not stop making tents, or being a Pharisee's student, or being a citizen of Rome, and he used every one of those things in the open. Matthew kept his pen. Luke kept his medicine.

You were never asked to forget forty years, and there is no line anywhere in the record that asks it of anybody. Exodus 3 has Moses keeping the flock of his father in law on the day the bush burns, and the Spirit who arranged that detail into the text did not treat the sheep as an embarrassment to be got past.

The new birth is not an amnesia. It is nowhere described that way. What changed at the bush was not Moses's résumé. It was who the man belonged to, and the résumé went with him.

You have a history God has never once handled as contraband, and it is already in the account rather than waiting outside to be admitted. Scripture keeps the shepherd, the tentmaker, the tax collector's pen and the physician's training right in the frame, and it is His Spirit who put them there rather than any generosity on the part of the people writing.

The birth changes the hand, not the history

So what is the new birth doing, if it is not erasing?

It is doing what a birth does. It is a thing done to a person by Someone else, from above, which is why Scripture calls it being born of God and never calls it a man remaking himself. And a birth does not delete what came before it. It starts something that was not there.

You are looking at a birth and not a deletion, and it was a birth in the record long before it was anything in anybody's experience. John's first chapter says born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God, and it is the Spirit doing that work rather than any tidying up a man performs in his first two weeks.

Then Paul gives the instruction that fits a pair of hands.

Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God.Romans 6:13

Instruments. The word he uses is the word for a tool, or a weapon: a thing that gets picked up and used. And yield is a handing over, which is something a man can only do with what he already has. You cannot yield what you threw away, and you cannot yield what you never had. It is an instruction written for full hands.

You have a word here that names your members as instruments to be handed over, and handing over is only ever done with what is in the hand. Romans 6:13 says yield, not destroy, and the same Spirit who inspired the verb chose one that requires the thing to still be there.