The Tally on the Drive Home

The light at Hollis and Fourth is the longest light in town and everybody who lives out this way knows it.

Sunday, ten past twelve. He is four minutes from the church parking lot with his tie already loosened and the radio on whatever came on when he turned the key. There is a car wash on the corner with the inflatable arms flapping at nobody. The car in front of him has a dealership sticker and a dent in the bumper he has memorized over two years of this same light.

And he is doing the math.

Four good days this week. Three bad. Last week it was three and four, which he remembers, because he remembers all of them. Not written down anywhere, or mostly not, though there is a note on his phone from February he has never deleted. It runs in his head the way a fan runs in a room: constantly, quietly, and you only notice it when it stops.

Good day: up early, read something, did not lose his temper at work, called his brother back, kept his eyes and his mouth where they belong. Bad day: the opposite, plus the twenty minutes afterward of promising himself tomorrow.

He is twenty six. He has been at this seriously since he was twenty two. And the tally has a purpose, which he has never said out loud to one human being, because saying it out loud would make it sound like what it is.

He is trying to find out whether it is real.

That is the whole thing. If the ratio ever went decisively the right way and stayed there, then he would know. Five to two. Six to one. Some week where it finally tips and holds, and he could put the question down. Because a thing that is real should show up in the numbers, and the numbers have been close to even for four years.

The light changes. He goes.

And what gets him, half a mile on, is not the tally. It is that he was not surprised to find it running. He caught himself mid calculation and felt nothing at all, the way you notice your own breathing. Which means it has been going the entire time, under everything, under the singing this morning, under the last four years.

He pulls into the driveway and sits there a second with the engine ticking, and the sentence he would never say to anybody surfaces all the way up: I think I have been trying to earn a birth.

You know the tally. Yours might be a streak, a habit tracker, a mental list you run on the way out of a service, or one number that goes up and down and decides what kind of person you are that day. And you know the question underneath it, the one it is actually trying to answer, that you have never put in those words to anybody.

Not of him that runs

There is one line of Paul's I want under you before anything else, and he chose the picture in it on purpose.

So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy.Romans 9:16

The older wording is sharper: not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth. A runner. A man giving everything he has, arms going, lungs burning, doing the honest work of running, and Paul says that is not what this rests on.

Now hear me carefully, because there is a way to read that which is not what it says. It does not say the running is bad. It says the running is not the reason. Those are entirely different sentences and the difference is your Sunday afternoon.

You are not the load bearing wall in this, and you were never built to be one. Romans 9:16 puts the weight on the mercy of God and takes it off the exertion of the man, and it is His Spirit who makes that sentence go from a doctrine you agree with to a weight coming off your chest at a red light.

And consider who wrote it. Paul had the finest religious record in the ancient world and he listed it once, the way a man reads out his own tally: circumcised the eighth day, tribe of Benjamin, a Pharisee, blameless under the law. Then he counted the whole column as loss. Not because the entries were false. Because he had found out what the column was worth as evidence.

You have been keeping books on something that was never going to be settled by books, and it is already finished in the hand of the One who has mercy. His word says it plainly, and the Holy Spirit does not audit a man's week before deciding whether to move in his life.

Nobody assists at their own delivery

Go back to the word itself, because the word is a birth and a birth has a very particular property.

No one has ever helped with their own. Not one person in the history of the world contributed a single push to their own arrival. The whole event happened to them. They were the object of it from beginning to end, and every one of us is walking around today as the result of work somebody else did.

Scripture is not vague about who does this one.

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

You are looking at a verse that names the worker and it is not you, and you were not on the list of contributors even on your good weeks. Titus 3:5 rules out works done in righteousness by name, and the renewal is credited to the Holy Spirit in the same breath, which is exactly why four good days and three bad days is not a measurement of anything He did.

And in Ezekiel God says it in the first person, over and over, and every verb is His: I will give you a new heart. I will put a new spirit within you. I will remove the heart of stone. I will put my Spirit within you. Count the pronouns. There is not a clause in there where the man does anything.

You have a heart of flesh promised by a God who used the word I every single time He described the transaction, and it is already settled who is doing it. Ezekiel 36:26 is His word and not my summary, and the Spirit He speaks of putting within is the one doing the work, so a tally of good days is measuring the wrong quantity in the wrong units.

So what are the good days for

Now, I am not going to leave you here, because there is a cliff on this side of the road too and I have watched people drive right off it.

Somebody hears all that and concludes the running does not matter. Skip the reading, skip the calling your brother back, it is all grace anyway. That is not freedom. That is just a different way of missing what happened. Paul answered it before anybody asked.

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.Ephesians 2:8-10

Watch the order in that. Not a result of works, so nobody can boast, and then immediately: created for good works, which God prepared beforehand. The good works are not the cause. They are the country. They were laid down ahead of time like a path put in before anybody walks it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who walks a man down it, which is the most natural thing in the world for somebody who lives there.

You are free to keep every one of those good days, and it is already yours, the part where they never had to prove anything. Ephesians 2 says prepared beforehand for us to walk in, and the Holy Spirit is the one who walks a man down them, so the reading and the phone call and the temper you held are not currency now. They are just Tuesday, in the country you live in.

Jesus put it in a picture and He put it in the right order. The branch does not manufacture fruit under pressure. It stays joined to the vine and the fruit turns up. Nobody ever saw a branch straining. If a branch kept a tally of its own grapes it would be the strangest thing in the vineyard, and it would not add one to the crop.