Still Writing The List While They Sang

The notebook was green, with a spiral that had gone oval from being shoved in and out of a handbag, and Nadine had it open on her knee in the back row.

It was a Tuesday. Forty or so people, folding chairs, the tea urn ticking as it heated up at the back of the hall. Somebody had started a song about eleven minutes ago and it had not stopped, because it was one of those evenings where nobody was in a hurry, and the woman beside Nadine had both hands up and her eyes shut and was singing the same four words over and over.

It is finished. It is finished.

Nadine was writing item fourteen.

She had been keeping the list since she was nineteen. Not the same notebook, obviously. There had been a blue one, and a phone note for a while, and a period in her thirties where it lived on the back of a diary. The list was the things she was going to sort out. Not sins in the church sense, most of them, just the accumulated stock of a life: the sister she had not called in two years, the temper, the way she spoke to her son when she was tired. Item fourteen was about the tired thing.

She was fifty two years old and the list had never once been shorter than fourteen items.

And here is what she was doing in that back row, and she would not have been able to tell you she was doing it. She was writing a payment plan. Every item was a small installment on a debt she believed was outstanding, and the singing at the front was for people who had got their list down to nothing. Good for them. She would get there.

Then she looked up.

Forty people with their eyes shut singing it is finished like it had happened. Not like a target. Like news. Like something that had been in the papers that morning.

And she looked back down at her own handwriting, item fourteen, half a sentence in, and had a thought that was not comfortable and would not go away for weeks afterward.

They think this is about something that already happened. And I have never once been told what it was.

She was not being difficult. She had been in rooms like that for thirty years and had heard a thousand talks about what a Christian ought to do, and how to pray better, and what God wants from your Monday. She had a whole vocabulary of response. What she had never been handed was the thing being responded to.

So put the pen down for a minute. Not forever, and not because there is anything wrong with your list. Just for the next few minutes, because I want to stop the singing and show you what they were actually singing about.

What the room was singing about

Start where the whole thing starts, which is a night in Egypt and a lamb.

Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male of the first year: ye shall take it out from the sheep, or from the goats: and ye shall keep it up until the fourteenth day of the same month: and the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it in the evening.Exodus 12:5-6

Read what was inspected. Four days that lamb was kept in the house, and the reason was inspection: it had to be looked over, and looked over again, and found without blemish. Nobody inspected the family. Nobody went through the household asking who had lost their temper that week or who had not spoken to their sister in two years. On the night of the Passover, the examination fell entirely on the lamb, and every person inside that doorway was safe on the strength of what the lamb turned out to be.

That is the shape you have been reading backwards your whole life. You have been inspecting yourself for a Passover that inspected the Lamb. The examination was never yours to pass, and Exodus 12:6 puts the whole weight of it on an animal that had no idea it was carrying a household. Four thousand years later, His Spirit is showing that to you in a back row.

Then the offering, which is the piece the list is really arguing with.

For centuries there was a rhythm to being right with God, and it was the rhythm of a person with a list. You brought something. You went home. It worked, and then the week turned over and you brought something again. The writer of Hebrews puts a picture of it in one sentence, and the picture is a posture.

And every priest standeth daily ministering and offering oftentimes the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins: but this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God.Hebrews 10:11-12

Standing, standing, standing. Then one man sat down.

A priest never sat down in the sanctuary, because sitting means the work is over, and the work of that place was never over. So the writer is not decorating. He is telling you what the offering accomplished by telling you what happened to the posture of the one who made it.

But now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.Hebrews 9:26

Once. Put away. That verb means abolished, set aside, done with, and it is not aimed at your best items. It is aimed at the whole notebook.

So this is already true of you and not pending: you are on the far side of an offering that was made once and is not being repeated. That is Hebrews 9:26, written down and unedited for twenty centuries, and the same Spirit who moved that writer to choose the word once is the one keeping it in front of you while you read.

And then the tomb, because an offering nobody could check is a rumor.

And they found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre. And they entered in, and found not the body of the Lord Jesus.Luke 24:2-3

The tomb was empty. Not symbolically, not in the heart of the disciples, not as a way of speaking about hope. John went in and describes the linen lying there and the cloth that had been about His head wrapped together in a place by itself, which is the detail of a man who has looked at something carefully because he cannot believe it.

Here is why that matters to a woman with a notebook. An empty tomb is a receipt. It is the public evidence that the offering was accepted, because if any part of it had been refused, He would still be in there.

Which brings you to the last piece, and it is the one nobody put in front of Nadine in thirty years.

Concerning his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh; and declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead.Romans 1:3-4

The resurrection is the Father's verdict on His Son. It is the Father saying out loud, in an act nobody could stage, what He had already said over the water at the Jordan: this is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. The offering was weighed by the only one whose weighing counts, and the Father raised Him.

You are inside that verdict right now, and not on approval. Romans 4:25 says He was delivered for our offenses and raised again for our justification, and Ephesians calls you accepted in the Beloved, so the pleasure the Father takes in His Son is the ground under your feet; the Spirit of adoption is the reason you can hear that as yours instead of as someone else's good news.